Turn off your TVs

There are some huge advantages and disadvantages to writing a blog without comments.

The biggest advantage is that even though you shut out all the interesting voices, you shut out all the uninteresting voices as well. I'm one of the few people who doesn't have a cell phone, and one of the reasons is that I didn't feel that I should be at the beck and call of every person who might have my number. You wouldn't let anyone in your house who decided to knock on the door, so why should you let anyone wander on to your blog?

The biggest disadvantage is that in hearing no voices at all, you've consigned yourself to an echo chamber, where blogging becomes much like writing a diary. My mother keeps a diary, or at least kept one, and I have no idea what's going to happen to that book on the inevitable day when she can resume her peaceful nonexistence. (Life was once called by someone an inconvenient interruption to an otherwise peaceful nonexistence.) As I have no children and have no plans of having them, there's no one to whom this book could be passed. I feel that reading such a book would be a violation of my mother's privacy, even after her (hopefully far off in the future) death. In the same way, a blog can become self-contained. I've blogged private matters and have come to regret it, because really, what kind of person posts his private thoughts and deepest secrets all the hell over the web?

It's unlikely that I'll be doing further television reviews. Not only has the writer's strike dried up material, but as you can tell, the bulk of television shows deliver nothing in the way of entertainment. "Everybody Hates Chris" has become unwatchable, "Kid Nation" had a final episode which was an abortion, "The Simpsons" is still in its "painfully unfunny" period. Many of these shows weren't "funny bad" like Manos: The Hands of Fate, but bad bad, like rectal surgery. And trust me, there are so many people out there doing television reviews that I doubt my voice will be missed.

So what's next? Probably...baseball. Or hockey. I've always loved sports, and particularly sports history and statistics. Baseball and hockey are at two ends of a continuum, where it seems every gonad scratch in baseball is recorded and put into a database, whereas the only stats recorded in hockey seem to be goals and assists. Maybe there will be something worthwhile to write about that.

But will I be deleting the older blog entries? No, I won't. Might as well keep them here.

So does this mean the end of CINCGREEN's sojourn in Daria fandom? Most likely, yes. Now that I'm past forty, some sort of middle-aged gene has kicked in saying, "You know, you really shouldn't be wasting such time and effort on a cartoon about a bunch of teenage schoolgirls". When life gets shorter, one tends to look at things on a cost-effective basis, a basis which can be overridden if the activity tends to bring you great pleasure. Daria fandom got to the point where the amount of joy it was bringing me was no longer commesurate with the amount of time I put in, and like a middle-aged accountant, I cut it from my list of expenses.

I'll borrow some thoughts from Kevin Holden in Montreal and restate them as my own. Most of the fan fiction no longer interests me, except maybe for "Legion of Lawndale Heroes", and the only reason that interests me is that it was my creation and Brother Grimace is running with it. I've pretty much seen most of the fan fiction permutations out there. Furthermore, as the amount of fan fiction has dropped (show not on the air, y'know), the other chit-a-chat doesn't grab my interest.

More and more of the newer fans come off as sociopaths, undoubtedly drawn to the fandom because they sympathise with the rejected Daria, as the newer fans are real social rejects themselves --cutters, bulimics, bipolars, slackers who really really need the help of a good psychiatrist rather than a coffee klatch. (God knows *I* needed a good psychatrist; thank the stars I found one.) The current mentally ill members of the message boards can always find a sucker to listen to them, and to forgive the most egregious lapses in basic decorum or decency. (What's the old saying? "A sucker is born every minute, and two to take him?" It's a good gig, as some of those people remain coddled for years on end.) It begins to look like an episode of Jerry Springer, "Abusive Fans, and Their Enablers Who Just Can't Say No!"

The only real solution to that problem would have been to form a spin-off group of older, more mature fans -- more emotionally mature, anyway. But I concluded that it was too much time and energy to make a truly concerted effort, with no guaranteed payoff, and there would be another split of a fandom that's seen too much splitting anyway. Better to just let it go.

As Bob Dylan said, "Nostalgia is death." Time to move on to the next big thing, whatever that is.