One thing that has come of being shut in the office for 15 months or so is that I have finally found a use case for YouTube. The vintage-2016 iMac on the desk, which normally sat idle as a repository for iTunes content and TurboTax, was repurposed as the Zoom device so I could work on my laptop while on a call – and then, as the window to some background video. It only began in earnest once I figured out how to stop interstitial ads from interrupting the flow of the video, but once I did, suddenly I was able to put on one of those weird mallwave videos and idly not-watch it while on the job. The ethereal weirdness of seeing the era of my adolescence repurposed as hipster nostalgia porn was a good fit for the unreality of the early days.
Then, in June, I discovered that between two different users, most of the old U-Verse Showcase videos had been uploaded. The old demos for HD service on U-Verse were some of my original relaxation material in 2013 and beyond, to the point we called it the Prozac Channel and would have it on from the time I got home til I went to bed, to the exclusion of regular television. It soon became my primary distraction during the day, and calming enough during the dog days of summer.
Then, in a fit of madness one weekend while attempting a fasting-mimicking diet, we needed distraction and found it in Watched Walker, the videos of a fellow called Paul who just literally walks around London filming as he goes. Closed captioning has the descriptions and whatnot. It was as good a substitute for travel as I could have hoped for down the stretch in the back half of 2020, and if it seemed too frequently around Soho and the West End, it was more than made up for with the early mornings and rainy days and the occasional dalliances with the South Bank or Richmond or as far afield as Bath.
And at some point, I stumbled onto the world of lo-fi relaxation video – first coffee shop simulations, then quiet rooms in big cities with rain or snow or lights outside, then pub-like surroundings, and it became yet another mode of escape. I totally get how you would put this on your 32” TV and let it run all night, a window to someplace else when you’ve been too much in this world. A view from a Kansas City penthouse, snow piled up outside a city coffee shop, rain dripping off the eaves of a tiki hut while the waves crash under the moonlight out the window…it’s not much, but when you’ve spent a massive chunk of the last year confined to your own county and not leaving the car, it’s not nothing.
So now the question is: will it be possible in the next phase of my life to just cast this stuff up to the TV from the laptop and leave it running all through a pub evening at home? It’s not the worst idea, and if it’s the one good thing I get to keep from this pandemic, I’d have it…