I've Got Entertainment Overload

Oh no, how did this happen? Where do I go from here?

I've got entertainment overload. Too many options are piling up and no more time in a day. This shouldn't have happened, but I let it.

Plus, I can see where it will lead. I'm going to have wires everywhere. Eventually there's going to be excess wires. Something's going to get forgotten, a link will break in the chain sometime. And what is a working network of interwoven entertainment sources will eventually sit in shambles. Just last night the batteries died in one of my remotes.

"One of my remotes," it's enough to make me scream. There's so many remotes scattered around the house, they're like cockroaches, which, thankfully, I don't actually have. But if I did, they'd each have their own remote to sleep under. I just got another few remotes in the last few days, including one last night!

I've joined the good times crowd in the last few days. Of course I was already a member, pretty much, all this time, since I've kept up, by and large, with the various requirements for membership over the years. But I wasn't part of Netflix, let's say, since I'm not really much of a movie watcher. I like to see a few minutes of a movie when I'm exercising a couple times a day. But once in a while, it's nice to see some old movie. So now I've got that.

A couple weeks ago, I got a Wii. I never had one before because I haven't been much of a game player. I had a Colecovision in the '80s, but since then, I've let it all slide, till now. So that's all set up. And remarkably, the two go together, the Netflix on one of the TVs runs through the Wii. So you can see there really is a network of sorts, some interdependencies. Naturally, since I have a bedroom, why not get a Netflix ready Blu-Ray player to also pick up the wireless signal and give me a movie or two in there? So I got one of those.

Then on top of all that, I got a Kindle at Christmas. And I love that, and I'd be reading that if I weren't so busy with this other stuff.

Anyway, last night I started feeling the jitters of entertainment overload. I knew it was there, creeping up, and now, this morning, I woke up with that terrible sense of regret. Blah. Because somewhere in the back of my mind, I'm the guy who should be sitting at Walden, or a cheap imitation of it, with a lawn chair and a book. So there I am with my lawn chair and book, feeling like I have entertainment overload, at which point I throw away the book and have nothing but the chair.

I've entered a different realm with all this stuff.

(By the way, for all the movies Netflix has to stream directly, it really is a kind of piss poor selection. At this point, who still wants to wait for DVDs to show up in the mail? I've never had one in my life yet, but I can already see the drawbacks. Waiting is so ten years ago.)