So I had a choice this weekend.

I could stay home by myself, which is always my inclination. On top of that, it was my team’s turn to do set-up at church (we meet in a gymnasium) and I’ve finked out on the team twice this summer already.

Or I could go up to my brother Baal’s, where brother Moloch and his family were going. This would be a gesture to my family, which I’ve been (frankly) neglecting.

I decided the obligation to help with set-up took priority, so I stayed home.

This is how it worked out:

My pocket calendar said the set-up team would meet at 10:00 p.m. on Saturday. That’s late, but it’s not unprecedented. Sometimes they have events in the gymnasium, and we’re only able to get in when it’s clear. I was certain the message on my answering machine had said “10:00 p.m.”

So I showed up at 10:00 p.m. sharp. As I drove in and noticed that no other cars were there, the thought crossed my mind for the very first time that I’d gotten the meridian wrong. It had been 10:00 antemeridian, not postmeridian.

I waited ten minutes, then went home depressed, knowing I’d let the team down once again.

I was able to help tear down on Sunday morning, and as it turned out the floor mats had already been rolled out for them at set-up, so their Saturday morning job had been lighter than usual. But I still felt humiliated.

So I spent Sunday thinking dark thoughts, meditating on my many personal failings, studying my forehead in the mirror for the mark of Cain.

It seems to me this weekend is a sort of metaphor for life as an Avoidant. I remember a feature Edward Gorey did once for the National Lampoon years ago, called something like, “A Child’s Rainy Day Activity Book.”

Among the items in the “Book” were a number of cut-out figures, printed on the front and back of a single page. The instructions said, as I remember them, “You will note that several of these figures are printed front-to-back with figures on the previous page, so that if you cut out one, you will destroy the one on the other side. There are several ways to deal with this problem, all of them unsatisfactory.”

That seems to me a good motto for my life. “There are several ways to deal with my problems, all of them unsatisfactory.”

If I keep to myself and avoid my fellow man, I escape many unpleasant experiences, but at the same time make my whole life generally unpleasant and lonely, and I get depressed.

If I try to break out of my shell, I either have good experiences (which don’t happen that often, and I generally discount them if they do) or I have bad experiences, which validate my low self-esteem. This also leads to depression.

The choice seems to be between easily won depression and strenuously won depression.

What to choose, what to choose?

In any case my renter came home safe and sound this afternoon, so I don’t have to worry about losing my meal ticket just now.

I’ll have to put my mind to figuring out a reason to be depressed about that.

Debbie Rocker writes, “Want to be physically fit and mentally agile, svelte and sharp, athletic and articulate? Then exercise – simply exercise.” Yeah, yeah . . .

Mars Hill Audio points out an article by Camille Paglia in which she says the arts can be saved if they return to religion. Liberals, she says, need to let go of their harsh secularism and Marxist outlook while conservatives “need to expand their parched and narrow view of culture. Every vibrant civilization welcomes and nurtures the arts.”

Oh man, I’m useless tonight. I’m kind of worried, because I didn’t see my renter at all yesterday, and today there’s a message on the answering machine, asking why he didn’t show up for work.

You might pray that he’s OK. His name is John.

Talking of early television, that’s a subject I can discuss with some authority, being one of the first kids to grow up with the thing. And I’m not going to tell you how it blighted my mind. Television and my grandmother were about the only good things in my life when I was a kid. TV was the only friend I had that didn’t beat me up. Television got me interested in history and in Shakespeare.

For those of you old enough to appreciate it, or just curious, here’s a YouTube clip of the opening of the old Howdy Doody Show, one of the delights of my early life. Buffalo Bob Smith (the guy, unaccountably, in a pith helmet in this clip) was one of the great pitch men of the medium. He pushed Hostess Cakes and Wonder Bread and Tootsy Rolls, and a whole mess of other products, to gullible kids like me, and our parents hated it, but on the other hand the show kept us quiet for a while.

All those great kids shows died when the government “for the sake of the children” passed legislation forbidding characters on children’s programs from endorsing products. Almost immediately there were no more national or local children’s shows, and the programming space was filled with loud, violent, badly animated cartoons.

Thanks a lot.

Buffalo Bob’s real name was Schmidt, by the way, and most of his life he was a Lutheran, though he seems to have ended up a Presbyterian, for some unaccountable reason.

Note to anyone from WWTC Radio in the Twin Cities who happens to be reading this: The background jingle on that carpet commercial you’re running just now is a vile earworm, and probably toxic and dangerous to the general public. If it runs much longer I may have to take unilateral action. And nobody wants that, do they?

Delanceyplace has an excerpt on television today. College professors in the 1950s didn’t buy TVs, thinking they were a waste of time. James L. Baughman writes:

Columbia University historian Allan Nevins was surprised to learn that his colleague Richard Morris had purchased a television in 1951, ‘one of the first I have seen in the home of a real intellectual,’ Nevins wrote. ‘Most reading and reflective people abominate them.’ The ‘television snobbism’ at Princeton University was so great, history professor Eric Goldman remarked seven years later, that a distinguished colleague had to sneak into Goldman’s house to watch TV.

In an Aspen, Colorado, performance of “Scenes From Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,” Brutus stabbed himself.

Brutus: “Stoop, Romans, stoop, and let us bathe our hands in Cæsar’s blood up to the elbows . . . Oh my. I seem to have stabbed myself.”