a toast to a televisionary

BEEN GOING over the top with my insomnia lately, and living up to the heights of flight such witching hours can offer: an invitation to be vigilant, to empty one’s attention out for a journey into the depths of discovery.

Never thought I could stay riveted in front of the television with a monk’s devotion, an autistic’s focus and clarity, or a marathoner’s energy. Not until I got the DVD of the transcendent HBO production, “Six Feet Under,” containing the entire five seasons created by Alan Ball (writer of the critically-acclaimed “American Beauty”).

As long as I soaked up transfixed to its visionary concoction about a family who runs a funeral home—where the messed-up lives of the main and minor characters feel like second skin even as they hover like music and dance around despair and the inevitability of death--why bother about workaday schedules gone awry?

All that jazz about the human condition, with its bottomless cocktail of horror and humor, are here attuned to higher frequencies of omniscience. In my book, this series is the closest to ransacking a library for a crash course on the meaning of our mortality.

How downright affirmative to have been addicted!