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what my GTL exemplars routinely accomplish in a single day? Indeed, I could whine about how my job is more difficult and time-consuming than the cast’s seasonal work maintaining a stall full of Federal Boobie Inspector T-shirts, but is it, really? I could note that I’m at least ten years older than these kids, so how could I possibly be expected to keep up with the breakneck pace of twentysomething hedonism. Would that be the truth? I think I’d be far better served to adopt the Situation’s attitude of brutal honesty, and realize right now that even with this simple model of Guido-ness laid out before me, I’m never going to be able to cut it. As Sitch himself might say to me, when I once again break my no-MTV vow to tune in for the inevtiable second season of The Shore in order to experience another summer vicariously through a cast that’s now a year buffer, tanner, and cleaner than I can ever hope to be: The spirit isn’t willing, and the flesh is weak-sauce.

17

CORRUPTED REALITY

Rex Sorgatz

“THIS LOOKS FAKE,” says Cynthia with a hint of superiority. Our limbs are entangled on the couch, but our eyes are focused on the television.

“Yes,” I say enthusiastically, thwarting her attempt to neg me. “I suppose that’s why I like it.”

“But isn’t this your life?”

It is deep into Sunday night, past the hour when HBO drops its weekly smart bombs. Cynthia and I have been dating for only a few weeks, but it isn’t going well. The moribund conversation preceding Six Feet Under needs rescue, so I begin to show off my channel-surfing skills, a sport mastered only through years of arduous college training. As she sighs in boredom at my fickle clicking, I launch into a rant about how her on-demand, TiVo-reared generation could see the extinction of an entire art form, “the channel-surfing craft,” and with it, “the frisson of random media.”

“You have completely forgotten the fundamentals,” I conclude with fervor.

Instead of staring at me, she gazes at the forty-six-inch plasma.

The tension intensifies when the remote stops on my current favorite show, Cheaters, which my irony-deficient amour describes as “for and about scumbags.” It’s early in the relationship, so I’m still trying to impress her, but I’ve now mentally concluded that we’ll break up by the end of month. How could I date someone who doesn’t appreciate the three-act technical masterpiece of Cheaters?

Act I: a query about infidelity posed by a television private dick.

Act II: an investigation into the affair recorded on camera.

Act III: a confrontation regarding the indisputable lechery, usually concluding in fisticuffs.

Even though I am convinced that Cheaters is what Shakespeare would make if he had access to hidden video cameras and crystal meth, perhaps introducing adultery on the fifth date is unwise. So I click on.

In the upper channels, in that area where Iron Chef reruns play tag with subtitled movies, I accidentally land on something called Storm Watch.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, yes!” I gasp as a menacing Storm Watch logo bustles across the screen. In a rare moment of almost-intimacy, Cynthia glances at me with a look questioning my elation.

“A reality show about natural disasters? Really?”

But I point to the tube. My face is on the television.

Cynthia is understandably confused. Trying to speak over my own voice coming out of the surround-sound, I quickly attempt to explain why a decade-younger version of me is glowing in the living room: After surviving a flood and fire many years ago, I was asked to do a video reenactment of my escape. We are now watching this very show.

“Is this a setup? Did you know this would be on?” she asks, as a whiff of postproduction smoke crosses my televised face.

“No!” I am shocked by her inability to find poetry in serendipitous media.

And that’s when she says it: “This looks fake.”

Now I really don’t like her, but she is right about one thing: it does look fake.

Historically, mainstream pop entertainment has seldom been intentionally controversial. Disposable sitcoms, paperback novels, chick flicks—these are