Coronavirus Quarantine Diary: Day Maybe Around 30, Entry Nine, Favorite Sit Coms, and Dark Moods

I wanted to write something today. Something memorable. Something that would hang in the air taking solid form. Something I could climb up and repose on and dance with and shimmy down the hall in the company of. I wanted to write something big. Something that The New Yorker would pay me double for. That Forbes magazine would take notice of. That would be featured on the PBS NewsHour. Something that pundits would discuss. I wanted something that anti intellectual right wingers would rail about. I wanted to write something that would be compared to the best of James Joyce and at the same time to Hemingway and somehow to Descartes and to The Beatles, of course. I wanted to write something that would be hung in the Louvre and would be credited with reviving literature. I wanted to write something that would cause a national holiday to be declared so that people could take the time to read it. I wanted to write something that was translated into 100 languages. I wanted to write something that would soar to the heavens. With wings. I wanted to write something that you could taste, feel, smell and hold.

I wanted to consequently be hailed a genius and awarded a special Pulitzer Prize and an extra special Nobel Prize. I wanted to receive long standing ovations and parades and I wanted to be celebrated by the rich and famous and to have beautiful women throw themselves at me. I wanted to be hailed and feted and honored and applauded and acclaimed and extolled and given encomiums and kudos and hosannahs. I wanted the writing to earn me riches beyond my wildest dreams.
— From a Streams of Unconsciousness blog post dated 3/8/15.

Last week saw the airing of the final episode of Schitt’s Creek a sitcom that the missus and I very much enjoyed. If you are unfamiliar with the show, I strongly recommend that you, in modern parlance, “check it out.” You can thank me later. Schitt’s Creek was so good that upon it’s completion I realized it was worthy of a lofty perch among my top ten all-time favorite sit coms. The fact that I had no such list of course necessitated me creating one. In trying to do so I realized that a top ten excluded too many hilarious shows so I made it a top 20. Here it is:

My Top 20 All-Time Sit-Coms
1. Seinfeld
2. 30 Rock
3. The Mary Tyler Moore Show
4. Fawlty Towers
5. Schitt’s Creek
6. Extras
7. The Honeymooners
8. Men Behaving Badly (British Version)
9. The Bob Newhart Show
10. Blackadder
11. Taxi
12. The Jack Benny Program
13. The Odd Couple (The original version with Klugman and Randall)
14. Frasier
15. Brooklyn Nine-Nine
16. The Phil Silvers Show
17. The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show
18. Brockmire
19. I Love Lucy
20. Cheers

Honorable Mention: The Dick Van Dyke Show, Get Smart, Car 54 Where Are You?, WKRP in Cincinnati, Sanford and Son, Night Court, The Andy Griffith Show*, Will and Grace (original version), and The Office (British Version).

Monty Python and the Flying Circus did not make the list because it is in no way a sitcom. Were I to include it, it would sit at the top of the list. Also not included was The Simpsons because it is —as you may have noticed — animated. If I were to include it, it would be at number two with the caveat that only the first dozen seasons or so should be considered.

*Only up until Don Knotts left, after that it was flamingly mediocre.

Also you will note that the show Friends is nowhere to be found on this list or among the honorable mentions, this is solely because I hate the show.

My favorite Western is The Searchers

And now, a word or two about lists. In days of yore when on this blog I wrote almost exclusively about films and many of my posts were linked on the Internet Movie Database, I had a sizable readership (today it’s just you and me Connie Spankenship of Dover, Delaware). I often would include various lists similar to the one above. It was interesting to note the responses I got despite having clearly labeled the lists “my favorite." I was not trying to tell a sole, not even myself, that they were the greatest. Nonetheless readers would be indignant that I left off a favorite of theirs and in some cases would cry foul at the inclusion of a film they didn’t like. For a list of my favorite Westerns one commenter opined that given what I had left out, I must never have seen a Western in my life. Left unexplained was how I managed to list ten of them. Another person frothed at the mouth because I had nothing from Sergio Leone. Again this was a list of my personal favorites. Imagine getting peeved with someone because they don’t like the same flavor of ice cream you do. Clearly some people come to such lists hoping to see mirrored (and thus validated) their own personal favorites. Here’s what I do when I see a list of someone’s favorites. I look for commonality with my own and if there is some I look to see if she or he has included a film I’m unfamiliar with. If so then I look into that film. If someone’s list is totally different than what I would have made my impulse is to think: "this person has different tastes than I do.” Perhaps that will mean I’ll be less likely to read her or his writings in the future. But I won’t get angry. Another common response to lists is the more passive aggressive: you forgot….This is a way of noting that you did not include one of their favorites without them seeming bent out of shape about it. I sometimes reply, “no I didn’t forget Sunshine at the Vomit Palace, it’s just not one of my favorites." I wonder if I’ll get an angry screed from someone about this latest list? Maybe it will be a more honest one and read as follows: "You don’t have the exact same favorites in the exact same order as I do and so I’m unnecessarily upset. Shame on you."

In other news, the corona virus. I'm still no fan. So far it has not increased the number of hours I spend in depression but it has intensified the hours in a most unpleasant way. I now provide an example. A couple of days I got I was in the throes of a nasty bout of melancholia that was not so bad that I couldn’t write so I decided to try to write about it. I think what came out gives some insight to where my brain goes in darker moments.

I am feeling corona depression to the nth degree. It is and it has been and it seems to want to continue to be. I’ll go on and on thinking and trying and being but there is that awful pounding of horror terrorizing the existential and the permanent and temporal and oh how I could be living in another time in other circumstances doing something else and being.

There was 1974. I could do that again. That was a lot of fun. There were parties there were people there were drinks there were girls there was kissing and there was hope and I was not depressed or repressed or in need of medication. I was 20 years old and believing in the power of fun which was my lord and master.

Now it seems there is no hope no relief only suffering and misery and this until I die and of course that could be any. Day. Now. Or I might go through hell on this earth in my waning days or months or weeks or moments or — god forbid — years.

This is not what I’d planned for myself. Not that I’d ever done much planning at all. I anticipated nothing but that night. Foreswore.

Who was I? Who have I been? Who am I now — just a lonely, suffering old man no use to any of you young healthy brazen and beautiful people. It is all so unknowable. So awful.

There. That was it unedited (remarkable that I make less or no typos when depressed). Light-hearted and fun, wasn’t it? No? I’m feeling okay today as evidenced by the rest of this blog post which has been pretty darn cheery. How about that?