The Lance Mannion way

I have it on good authority that Lance Mannion writes his blog posts directly into his blogging software’s composition window as opposed to say, writing with WordPad or Word or Oingo Boingo or some other word processing program.  Lance you see is a white hot explosion of dendrites and dander; a viscous Vicount of Vituperation; a Free Falling Festschrifter…He’s a REAL blogger, not one of these amateur drive your grandma around the block in order to prove that you’ve passed your driving test kind of bloggers.  Nope.  Lance is big as Mt. Rushmore; big as all the dental floss in Montana.

Meanwhile I’m a little guy in "the blogosphere" and there’s no help for it.  I don’t think this comparative teensy-weensy-ness in the cyber Babylon has to do with the fact that I write about disability but rather that I am essentially a really small person.  I am officially five feet seven inches tall, but I’m really really small.  I’m smaller than P.T. Barnum’s Tom Thumb.  I’m smaller than Dick Cheney’s heart.  I’m smaller than Barry Bonds’ conscience; smaller than the book of rules for "scissors, rock, paper"…

I didn’t start out small.  I used to have an immense corpus both "in" and "outside" my essential postural entity.  But I shrank.  I spent too many years listening to American television and I got to the point where I actually believed that it was okay to show lurid tabloid stories over and over in lieu of real news. This insidious tabloidization of my psyche made me small.

I am prepared to say that after a decade of watching Law and Order and the local news I’m smaller than a hermit thrush. I am sadly not as musical as the hermit thrush but that’s another story.

I think Lance Mannion can both watch tv and remain "big".  He’s amazing.  But I’m "outing" myself.  I’m unable to maintain anything like a human scale largely because of the effects of everything from the Gong Show to the Star Trek re-runs that I find whenever I can’t sleep.

Okay.  Getting small while watching tv isn’t new.  But Lance, he actually gets bigger while watching the tube.  And there’s no "double entendre" here.  I don’t mean to suggest that he watches one of those nudist specialty channels like they have in New York, you know, where old celebrities sit around naked and talk about Italian football.

No, I mean Lance watches genuine big time tv and he’s still smart.

I once read Yeats’s book "A Vision" which is about spiritual forces in the evolving universe and I thought for a moment that I understood it.  But tv?  Look what it’s done to me!  I’m smaller than a raisin in Lapland.  Maybe after some good corrective post-television "time out" I will be large enough to explain why Neil Postman was not exactly right when he wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death and suggested that tv represents the end of critical thinking in America.  Look at Lance!  Look to Norway!  He’s big!  I wish I could multi-task like Lance!  But you know, when I watch tv I forget to chew.  I forget the name of the town I’m visiting.  I get so small while watching tv that I can sleep in one of my own shoes.  My shoe, by the way, smells like my freshman college dorm room.  More on that later.

S.K.

Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University View all posts by stevekuusisto