I Live Over There

There are times when a writer just plain has to fess up to her darker side. When what is real burns painfully in your gut like a blazing fire that won't go out. When the ordinary is swept aside by the deep urge to confess and be made clean. This, dear reader, is one of those times.

I know, I know . . . Many will shout, "Stop! Don't! Think of what you are doing! Let what happens in your psyche stay in your psyche!" I have considered the warnings. I know I might lose friends. I might lose readers. As for my family . . . well, don't we all, in the end, disappoint one another with our human frailties?

They say the truth will set you free. (It will probably also kill you first, but whatever.) Therefore, dark heart, beat on. Tell what needs to be told.

I cannot deny it. It is thus: I am deeply, totally, irrevocably addicted--to NCIS.

I have tried to stop watching it. I have vowed to shun USA, the channel of re-runs. I have shrieked that it is merely fantasy, that none of the characters are real. I have said, "See, you were disappointed with the opening show of the new season. It is time to leave!" I have done all that, and still I flip on channel 47 every night, praying for an episode I haven't yet seen, falling into blissful contentedness with the ones I already have. I am hooked, oh yes, I am indeed.

I have sometimes believed I am a writer because characters live in my head. Also, thoughts, flights of fancy, and observations. But it is the characters who scream to get out. And so I let them out, on the page.

With TV, the characters walk into my head. They are not my own creation, and yet they live, deeply, in my mind and heart. It is as if they clasp my brain synapses and vow to stay forever. And I believe it, every time.

I think there are some of us, readers and writers and viewers, who, much like a frog jumping from lily pad to lily pad, live by leaping from story to story. It is how we survive what is always a complicated life. So I am inclined to forgive my addiction. I am, after all, only human, only frog.

So when you see me standing in front of you, yes, I am present in my corporeal form. But I live over there.