Morning Pages: August 21st, 2020

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, I've been locking myself down until I think it's safe to go out again. To alleviate fear and stress, my writer's group has put together a daily "morning pages" get-together on Zoom in order to touch base before starting the day. Here's some of my brief thoughts.

Licky licky!

I finished binge watching "Parks and Rec" yesterday (or really this morning)! I have to say, I'm really digging binge watching TV shows, I never knew it could be this fun. Or really maybe I could, because the average American watches something like five hours of television...? The problem is that now I can't watch these shows for the first time again...! Which really sucks, because I'm always just a little terrified that the next TV show I watch will suck, especially at the end. "Parks and Rec" is great (and I'll probably have a TV show review posted by end of this weekend), but I don't think the cult following is as big as say "The Office". I wonder if there are other Office-like mockmentaries, I think that's kind of my sweet spot. Seems like a healthy addiction if there ever was one.

Otherwise I guess I can read through the Scala and formal reasoning books I have at a quicker pace, probably need to do so anyways for work and stuff.

Speaking of TV shows (and today's topic of speechwriting w.r.t. the DNC speech), there was this one TV miniseries recorded in the 1980s about what a bloodless coup of the U.S. by the Soviet Union would look like. It's called "Amerika" and I do say it looks freakishly realistic given how reality has played out. Some nice snippets include Congress getting massacred, the country broken up into different occupational zones, and the abandoning of American ideals by the citizenry leading to those who wish to restore the United States being called "libtards" and such. Because that's totally not the future.

This is why I prefer to stick to "The Office" and "Parks and Rec" and such, happy positive TV shows because then I'd have something healthy to look forward to. Maybe some guys would want to be Andy, or Ben, I think I'd like to be Gary Gergich and live in a pastel-colored house eating bacon and eggs every morning and having a hug train with a wife and daughters before going to work and be positive and upbeat no matter what the world throws at me. That sounds pretty awful nice right about now.