Lost and Alone

The DVD with the first three episodes of Season 5 of Lost arrived this week.

It has been a long time since I was psychologically able to sit through an extended television series. As I've said, if it doesn't involve large men chasing a small ball, inclement weather, food, or the busting of myths - all things that can be watched in three-minute increments - I'm pretty much not watching it. I'm not entirely sure why this is so - certainly I used to be able to watch television shows, and I put that talent to some hard use in my day. And there are some good shows on these days, from what I hear. But after not owning a television for most of the 80s and only gradually getting back into it in the 90s, this past decade has been just a tv bust for me.

I turn on shows - even shows I used to watch all the time, like reruns of Law and Order or some such - and after about three minutes I'm flipping around the channels looking for a ball to watch. I've even watched random English Premier League matches rather than spend time looking at things with actual dialogue.

It's twisted, I know. But the announcers get so excited about what looks like, to my uneducated American eye, a couple of dozen guys jogging around trying to look productive in between random spells of mad pell-mell dashing about. You have to love it that way. And sometimes somebody scores, which just makes everything that much better. I just wish the announcers spoke a dialect of English comprehensible to someone with less than an Imperial gallon of ale sloshing about their innards.

At least it's not cricket.

But Kim has just fallen in love with Lost. It has characters and plotlines, and inside jokes that only the initiated can get. It has mind-bogglingly improbable twists that happen to weirdly obsessive characters who all knew each other several lifetimes earlier under assumed names. You know what it is? It's Dickens, all dressed up for the 21st century. I remember slogging through Great Expectations in 9th grade with all the clarity of a traffic accident, and despite having to revise my estimation of Mrs. Havisham considerably upwards after reading Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next books, I still have no real desire to get back to more Dickens.

Kim watched most of Seasons 1 and 2 on discs from either the library or Netflix before discovering Hulu, where Seasons 3 and 4 lived. I liked the Hulu phase, since it meant that she was watching them downstairs in her office rather than upstairs in the bedroom, so I could go to sleep.

Not that I go to sleep much.

Or, really, that having the tv on really bothers me.

But if I switched from Lost to some random sporting event, as I no doubt would have been tempted to do, I would have quickly find myself sleeping in the car. And my back just can't take that anymore.

The girls have now been sucked in as well, so I'm the last holdout here. They're all in the living room now, even as I type, getting Lost.

There was a small crisis last week when Kim discovered that nobody had the first half of Season 5 and Season 6 was months - MONTHS - away. But Netflix to the rescue! Life can resume.

I suppose I can always do more blogging.

Or some actual work.

Is there a game on?