Cursing the dying of the light

I know that it is mid-November and the same thing happens every year but doesn’t it freak you out when you’re driving home at 5:30 and it is just pitch black out? Like things just got seriously dark in a hurry. It always seemed to be worse in South Bend. There late November seemed to be ominous, like nature was giving you a warning that dark times were ahead. Given that it is a part of the country where the sun seems to disappear for two months it was a rather fair warning.

Yeah, I probably shouldn’t even admit that I spent any time in South Bend right now. When I went out on Saturday night waiting for me at the door of my regular bar was a buddy of mine who happened to be a Navy grad and he even said he had been waiting a week just to give me crap about the game. The fact that Air Force had just won and we were named an eight point underdog against the Coast Guard didn’t improve things either. It is stunning to see a program perform this badly. My only hope is that we are doing this in order to get a good draft pick for next season. It might be are only shot at turning things around.

I’d do my usual review of How I Met Your Mother here but it is still sitting on my DVR. I’m beginning to build up a backlog of material on the DVR as I anticipate that the writer’s strike is going to make television even more of a barren wasteland than it currently is. Not that I do not support my Writer’s Guild brethren (I personally am picketing all filming in Kansas City, which admittedly doesn’t keep me busy) but this is going to be a long strike. Like maybe through next summer when the Screen Actors Guild, overpaid hacks that they are, go on strike. I’ve been pushing for the Writer’s Guild to put “only robots will be allowed to perform our pieces” but they rightfully keep me nowhere near the negotiation table.

But man, does this mean that television is going to start sucking quickly. I think Family Guy is already done with new episodes and HIMYM and Big Bang Theory will be over in a few weeks. That’s pretty much all of my must see TV right there. Everything else will go to reruns in a month or so with a few midseason replacements in position to provide a modicum of new content. Otherwise it is going to be reality television all the time.

On the surface you would think that that would be a godsend for me. I mean, I do seem to live on reality shows and I already have Danny pulling strings to get me on A Shot Of Love with Tila Tequila Part 2 (which is already being cast). The thing is I’m actually watching less of it. I still haven’t watched The Amazing Race this year and it is consistently one of my favorite shows. I’ve given up on Survivor, don’t know why but the show just doesn’t matter to me anymore. And Project Runway just isn’t that great of a replacement for Top Chef in my mind. That’s probably a good thing.

So in the end what will this mean? Maybe I’ll actually have time to read once again. I have gotten horrible at finishing books and it has started to annoy me. I definitely don’t read as much as I used to when I took the train to work but I’m not even reading half as many books a year as I should. When all of your reading takes place on planes things are not moving in the right direction. And then there is that pesky novel of mine that I now have ten months to write. Eek. The good news is that I already have the book jacket blurbs in. Who wouldn’t buy a book after seeing a back cover proclaiming “the font is really pretty”, “that’s some quality binding” and “in a survival situation you could probably burn it”.