I am seated in a black office chair with a hoard of dried booger stalactites on its underside. The floor is carpeted, so if I want to move, I have to fight against my weight and drag the wheels through vermin-nests of hair, solidified pools of cat piss, and baking soda landmines sprinkled on the floor to mask the smell of said pools. It’s just not worth it. And it’s also not worth going to Office Max with Mom to get a chair mat.
This is exactly where I want to be.
The shot clock has already started. It’s a warm Friday in September and I got off the bus twenty minutes ago, which means I have only thirty-one hours (give or take fifteen minutes) of TV time before Mom starts the weekday ban again. On school nights, I come home, eat, drink, do geometry homework between 3:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m., read a few chapters in my history textbook about Pittsburgh’s vital transportational role in the French & Indian War between 6:00 and 8:00, and end the night with a two-hour-long, jam-packed, all-in-one study sesh sometime between 9:00 and midnight for all the classes that didn’t assign homework so I can be ready when they do, all before brushing teeth and showering until 1:00 am and getting five refreshing hours of a good night’s sleep until the alarm sounds at 6:00 and the whole thing begins anew. But it is Friday. Mom’s “television rots your brain” bit doesn’t hit like it does Sun.–Thurs., and I’m backlogged with five days’ worth of episodes from a few family sitcoms––Malcom in the Middle, The Goldbergs, Fresh Off the Boat, Everybody Hates Chris.
Every second counts. So, when I crave movement, I lean the chair back on its two rear wheels until it hits the counter protruding from the wall behind me, the real thrill coming when I lean forward and feel––for just a moment when the chair desperately wants to move but isn’t sure where––pure equilibrium.
This is the most efficient place to overdose on TV in my home. The living room has a bigger screen, but the couch’s leather tends to stick to your skin, it’s backlit by a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows, and there’s way too much foot traffic. It wasn’t built for pure, uninterrupted TV consumption. Plus, why would I want anyone to watch me perform the visual equivalent of snarfing down twelve extra-large meat-lover’s pizzas?
My basement is perfect. The chair is covered with perpetually cool nylon and lurks discreetly within a 4×8 room behind a sliding door. It’s situated in front of a quartet of foot-tall monitors in the shape of an inverted jumbotron that serves as the room’s centerpiece.
The monitors present the perfect solution to the problem of ad breaks. For example: I mute an ad on show 1, monitor 1, triggering the start of show 2, monitor 2, until the break is over, at which point I pause show 2, monitor 2, till I hit another ad break. If an ad plays while I’m watching show 2, monitor 2, I call show 3, monitor 3, into action, and do the same for show 4, monitor 4, if there’s an ad on 3. And so on. I can be as uncommitted to a show as I want to be—if I hit a filler episode I don’t feel like watching or find myself uninterested in a couple of scenes, those get muted and replaced with another show I have already lined up.
I know what you’re thinking. Imagine what I could do with a fifth monitor. But four were just right. My cravings for TV during the weekdays were sufficiently subdued. Like religion, a bender breeds discipline, but with overindulgence instead of scriptures.
The only problem with the room is that, as in the rest of the basement, the ceiling is exposed. If I had the illusion of a finished ceiling, even just drywall overlaid with Styrofoam beads and acrylic resin, I wouldn’t have a constant visual reminder of weak-looking joists and the possibility of being at the bottom of a sinkhole.
The bigger issue, though, is the sewage line that runs from the bathroom immediately above the room, across the ceiling, and downward next to monitor 4. Again, I prefer the illusion of drywall, at the very least because of the added barrier between myself and my family members’ shit. And if we had drywall on the ceiling, I wouldn’t have to listen to the sounds of stuff leaving bodies or the house choking on it. But, proximity to shit and piss is a small price to pay for the most efficient dopamine machine ever constructed. Besides, I’ve spent enough time in this chair to develop a game of sorts trying to guess what kinds of shit cause the PVC line to gulp; it makes me think more about making accurate guesses than about what I’m actually guessing.
The only other family member who spends time listening to the glug-glug of the sewage line is my dad. He’s a radiologist, and although I sometimes forget this is his office, he set up these monitors to read scans of livers and brains. But he does most of his work at the hospital, and comes here only in one or two-hour intervals on weekdays (when I’m busy fighting the French & Indian War). My mom visits only before important holidays, when she needs to walk through to the next room, which houses a repository of Christmas ornaments, wreaths, stockings, plastic skeletons, chrome masquerade masks, and Peruvian nativity sets, all organized into IKEA bins and former shoe boxes. I don’t like the reminder that I’m seated a few feet away from buried decorations and old Halloween costumes. It feels unnatural––kind of like going to Chuck E. Cheese and seeing the middle-aged man in the mouse suit use Chuck’s head as a chair on his smoke break when you leave. Thankfully, though, unlike the ceiling, this part of the room hides itself.
And, thank God it’s September. No holidays. No foot traffic. No one downstairs but myself. Sunday’s going to be hell with all the stockpiled homework, but I’m not even thinking about that right now. I face four LED windows into four universes with all the lights turned off. I hold a bowl of Lay’s Salt & Vinegar chips, and think: Thank God no one else will sit in this chair for the next 31 hours. I’m scared of what they might find underneath. (I’m talking about the boogers.) Then I lean the chair back on its two rear wheels, and for a split second before it tips forward, I’m perfectly balanced.