Insomniac Theatre

One thing about persistent unemployment is how easy it is to have one’s schedule get all messed up. I’m kind of a night person anyways, so staying up really late just gets all that much easier if one is intent on getting all the way through a good book, or stuck in the middle of a marathon game of Civilization.

The problem is it’s much easier to get stuck into an awake at night and asleep during the day routine than it is to get unstuck. I can’t force myself to sleep if I’m not tired and there’s few exertions I can do at night to make myself tired that won’t wake up the sleeping party of the house. Basement activities are heard right above in the bedroom, so I can’t just get drunk and play pool or darts all night while listening to music. And this being autumn, and our house being situated on an acre of deciduous trees, there is certainly no shortage of leaves to be raked up -- a very exhausting activity -- but one can’t rake in the pitch of night.

So I end up sitting, as I said, at the computer or the TV, or reading on the couch, and while I do eventually get tired, usually that occurs between the hours of 6 and 10 a.m. Often I’ll tell myself to simply get through the next day. Eight o'clock would do, but I rarely make it to eight. So I sleep from noon to midnight, or 4 to 2 a.m. and then start the whole beastly process all over again.

I’d have to say one of the only things that helps me pass the time so well is the preponderance of decent serials to watch on early morning TV. If I didn’t have those I’m sure I would be quite out of my mind by now. Have you ever seen the tripe that comes on early in the a.m.? It’s no good turning to CNN or other news channels; they seem intent on exhibiting the most trite and insipid casts of happy morning people talking about TomKat’s wedding -- they actually use that expression, TomKat -- and other such exciting world events.

But lucky enough for me, the folks at TNT have decided that there are just enough lost souls out there with naught better to do than watch TV all night and early in the morning to play contiguous episodes of Angel and Charmed. Buffy is on FX, I have recently discovered, but that show is a lot harder to watch. They all have a lot of soap opera elements to them, which is barely tolerable to me. But Angel, which is a show about a brooding vampire hell-bent on destroying all the elements of evil in Los Angeles (think Blade without the guns and swords), is far less soapy, or is soapy in a much more supernatural way. People’s loves are lost not because they got a better job and moved to Seattle, but because they were taken by a great horned daemon into the hell of upside down sinners. Much more dramatic and imaginative, I think.

I’ve pretty much gotten to see the entire rise and fall of the vampire called Angel. By the way, the final episode of that show -- in which he and his cohorts all go out fighting the forces of evil in a prelude to the apocalypse -- is pretty awesome. Nothing like ending on a high note.

Buffy and Charmed center around primarily female casts, which seems to lend itself to far more discussions about why their Saturday night dates never work out and far fewer about what to do when the end of the world gets here. I think Angel, a Buffy spin off, must have been created to give the male fans of Buffy a way to regain their sanity. Likewise, Charmed, which I must admit initially attracted me because I had a thing for Alyssa Milano, was cool because of the supernatural sets and effects and the writers and directors’ love of soft pedal comedy. The show incorporated the gamut of myths and legends ever envisioned and dropped them all down onto the three sisters’ heads in a San Francisco setting. One of the coolest things to happen on that show was when Milano’s character Phoebe fell in love with a daemon called the Source, i.e., the source of all evil. Any evangelical Christian who had rationalized his viewing up until that point was thereby dismissed. But the female leads themselves were really annoying. There was no end of whining about love lives and such and when they brought a baby into the mixture it was all she wrote.

Buffy was all that coupled with a high school setting. Think Saved by the Bell with the occasional human sacrifice. If it were more like the movie version -- with a Pee Wee Herman vamp that refuses to die -- or something like Idle Hands, I could have taken it better. But then, the cast would have all died early and the series couldn’t have run until its high school heroes were getting gray hair.

But criticisms aside, at least I had them to watch during my all night Insomniac Theatre. It could be a whole lot worse. Maybe I’ll get lucky and the Sci-Fi channel will drop the all night infomercials and run the entire Dr. Who series from its inception. That, or a job and a workday schedule would be nice.