Daniel Coffeen

Love accepts and embraces. Love doesn’t judge; it doesn’t own. Self-loathing judges and owns. Ego judges and owns. Love, well, loves.

What a painful, ugly, exquisite gift!

I had a female friend who would always disparage young women who dated older guys (of course, said disparagement was aimed not very subtly at me).

My shrink told me an incredible story yesterday.

My dependence on coffee sometimes makes me feel weak — ergo, my humiliation.

What makes this one different is that you — not her — made this impossible, incredible, internal movement towards infinite affirmation.

The social web is a kind of always on camera, ceaselessly capturing text and image — capturing imprints of ourselves — our likes and dislikes, the pages we view and how long we linger, the Yelps, the tweets, the reposts and shares and retweets and so on and so on.

The universe becomes uncanny at its core, always shifting and realigning depending on how you look at it.

The ads for True Blood play on this: “Thou shalt not crave they neighbor.” But of course we do crave each other –– for love, sex, money, nurturing, healing, playing. The dictum of the ad is ambivalent, a supersession of the known moral code. Yes, it tells us, there is an ethics. But they are not certain or fixed because human relations are contractual and complicated.

The Wire performs what television can formally be, what it formally wants to be, how it wants to go. Television is not suited for the climax and dénouement that Hollywood loves so much. We watch television after work, in our pajamas, in our most intimate settings; it is intertwined with our lives. Television is not up there; it’s right here, in our living rooms.