My domesticity could cost us the next Sistine Chapel

I was stuffing my face with Japanese chicken at the Chinese buffet when the lady walked past my table and told me she likes my column. 

“Mmmph, fmmll rwroolf,” I said. (Loosely translated: thanks.)

I’m insecure, so I’m always happy to hear from someone other than my girlfriend who reads this thing.

“Sounds like you’re getting pretty domesticated,” she said.

My face must have been saying, “Huh?” because she continued: “You and Lori and the cats and the new TV.”

I understood. During the past few years I’ve mentioned a few times in this column that I own no television. I’m not one of those people that demand every media outlet be as edifying as reading Plato’s “The Republic” in the original Greek, say, but I didn’t see the point in cramming a TV into my tiny apartment just so Maury Povich could parade “Single Teenage Mothers and the Fathers/Boyfriends/First Cousins Who Got Them That Way” through my living room.

When shows like that come on TV, I always start getting nervous my brain will crawl out through my ear and try to make it on its own. A strictly defensive move on the part of my brain.

I figured not having a television was the safest way to avoid accidental exposure to this Jerry Springer-ish regurgitative spew that nowadays masquerades as entertainment. (Can you tell I have strong opinions on this topic?)

But somehow, when Lori and I decided to cohabitate, buying a new TV seemed like the most natural thing in the world, just the next brick in the road to domesticity. And that’s a good thing, right?

I thought so at first, but now I’m beginning to wonder. 

For the past five years, I’ve been more or less on my own, without female supervision. I would eat when I felt like it, sleep when I felt like it, fish when I felt like it … it was very much a “when I felt like it” existence.

I was so busy doing all the things I felt like doing that I didn’t really have time for TV. 

So how come I do now?

Honestly, I don’t know. 

Lori is a fiercely independent woman with more interests than she has time for. I’m sure if I felt like fishing, or taking my bicycle on a four-day cross-country jaunt, or doing any of the million other things that used to occupy my days, she’d be totally cool with it.  In fact, she’d probably be happy to get me the heck out of the house so she could take care of her own projects.

But I haven’t been doing any of those things, not as often as I used to, at least. I’ve been just sort of hanging around the house … “puttering,” in the patois of the middle-aged. (I assume I’m middle aged because I plan to live to 120.)

And I’ve been watching too much TV; a couple hours a night. At this rate, by the time I’m 120, I’ll have watched — hold on, lemme grab a calculator — 43,800 hours of television! That’s 1,825 days, or FIVE YEARS!

Five years, man! That’s a year longer than it took Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel! 

It’s unlikely I could accomplish anything so grand as the Sistine Chapel no matter how little TV I watch. But I’m sure I can do better than “Lesbian Nazis Who’ve Been Abducted by Space Aliens and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs” on Springer.

So. For sale: one gently used large-screen HDTV. It’ll be available on Craigslist. 

Right after this one last rerun of “Law & Order.”

mtaylor@staffordgroup.com

(616) 548-8273