land of the 'free,' home of the loud

When did every medical / surgical waiting room come equipped with a blaring television? Obviously, it was not always the case. In the Forties, Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, and maybe Eighties, it's not as if waiting rooms had radios to distract and divert us. What did people do? Read? Fidget? Pray? Converse? But starting -- when? -- in the Nineties or Oughties, televisions became ubiquitous in waiting rooms, as well as in a plethora of public places (supermarkets, barber shops, brothels, broth houses, sports bars, cafes, bistros, restaurants, fast-food joints, wedding chapels, betting parlors, electronics departments in mega-stores, corner stores, bodegas, salons, confessionals, opium dens). Televisions showing exactly what? Blather, folderol, pablum, static, chatter. Recipes, DIY, so-called news, energetic nihilism. Stories of triumph and optimism. America's great product: homegrown cheeriness blanketing doom. (You hear people use the phrase, "a disease of denial." But isn't all disease of denial? Go further, MadAvenue is built squarely on the bedrock premise of denying the Biggest D of All, the unmentionable and unspeakable closure of all closures.) So, today I paced a waiting room, an expectant father awaiting surgical news (all went well), searching for the never-to-be-found remote, tempted to tell the reception desk person to shut it all off, wishing If I Had a Hammer. What would Thoreau do? (WWTD?)

Waiting

Doctors use the term "watchful waiting" to describe a form of treatment for cancer patients. The prescription handed to me by the Unseen Hand ordains watchful waiting for me at this post-termination jobless Job-ish-feeling time (okay; I admit to just a teaspoon of melodramatic self-pity). Waiting is hard for me (and for most Americans), never mind adding an Advent-riddled watchfulness to it. So, what am I waiting for? Good question. I am waiting for that one call, e-mail, inquiry, letter, offer to make all things right. And as I write that, I see the fallacy of it. Or should I say the fallacy of IT (uppercase bold oblique underscore 48 point)?

In Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, the unemployed narrator, Toru Okada, spends long silent stretches of time in a deep, dark, dry well. He spends days down there, waiting. And the waiting (sometimes watching the ever more blazing stars from the well) wasn't all that bad, was it? He did it on purpose (or was compelled to do so.) He went down to the well, to sit, to wait, to listen, . . . to be.

I am in the well.

Waiting.

I'm not very patient by nature (and after all patience comes from the Latin verb for suffer). My coltish impatience, with its unruly recklessness, sort of got me into the well to begin with. (Or did it? Was it inevitable anyway?)

But I will wait.

I am waiting.

And who isn't waiting?

p.s. I did read Waiting, by Ha Jin, several years ago. I recall that I enjoyed it, but my memory is dim at this hour.