Netflix Chronicles

Watching movies alone, like drinking alone, takes a certain kind of discipline. Standards of what is and is not acceptable, with pathetic as a value at the far end of the scale, oscillate with mood, temperature (Air Conditioning being a luxury we pseudo-ascetics don’t deign to assimilate into our lives), and “x” variables such as what day of the week it is and how many papers you have to correct. Last night was a night of Syriana, tonight was very much a Crash night, and the acceptability ratio was very much pro-play button.
Watching movies alone in a rocking chair, after having run a mile and a half and jettisoned the idea of turning on the oven to cook a dinner you really have no desire to eat, also takes a certain kind of discipline, not unlike that which allows you to put one foot in front of another at an 8 minute mile pace for fifteen minutes even as the tar from eleven years of cigarettes seeks escape from the alveoli in which it has made a comfortable home.
Watching movies alone, with full acknowledgement of your addictive personality and the ease with which you could rack up a movie a night for God knows how long, takes a certain kind of discipline, not unlike the discipline it takes to limit yourself to one cigarette a day for two weeks and simultaneously supplant the habit with a fervent, shed-eight-pounds-in-one-week, transforming acquiescence to the need to make your body move frenetically for at least two hours a day until your calves seize up like pistons suffering from viscosity breakdown. Makes the day go by quicker, is the thing. The movies and the exercise and the pain and the flush of all the toxins that stand steady in your blood like remoras flitting in and out of a shark’s gill: either side of the same coin, is the thing.