Forty-two Inches of Addiction

Don’t do it, they said. You’ll regret it, they said. Once you start you cannot stop, they said. But it’s just this once, I said. I can stop anytime I want to, I said. I bought the attachments, I helped hook-up the instrumental parts to begin, together we contemplated our choices, and then we made our selection.

For better or worse, we began our journey with full acknowledgment of what the end results might be, but confident in our own will power, in that nothing but good could come of our actions. We never saw it coming, we never knew just how wrong we could be.

Our first journey would take us into the dark, secret world of motorcycle gangs, their families, their lives, and their destructible love for one another. At first I felt pure trepidation, it was so violent and unforgiving; their lives so strangled by their own honor code of kill or be killed. All I saw for days on end were crazy, delusional people; but then it all begin to change.

Suddenly they were all part of my family, their problems my problems, and their solutions, while not anything like my own; they suddenly seemed justified.  I was rooting for the men in cut-off sleeves and leather jackets, and their old ladies who dressed like era 1950; big hair, high-heeled pumps, and sass, loads of sass.

Sons of Anarchy gave me insight and wonderment, as well as confusion, as to who were really the good guys, and who were really not. I would watch til the bitter, but triumphantly sad end. Cheering for the bad guys, grieving that it was over, and reminiscing for all the lives I saw come and go in just three weeks’ time.

Afterward I was lost, my evenings were unaccounted for again, and my weekends empty; I know I said it couldn’t happen to me, but it did, so I delved back into the archives of shows gone past and found another family to follow, to love.

This family would lead us into the mysterious, powerful, and if to be believed, very scary world of The White House. Where the most powerful voices in the United States make all the important decisions, even the decisions about who will live and who must die, all for the good of the people. 

The president and his wife worked like well-oiled machines in their efforts to manipulate the world and how it is ran, and House of Cards would leave me to forever wonder and worry, if that’s the way the world really does work.

As if that view of the White House wasn’t enough, I’m now enjoying/worrying over another approach, where the scenes are run from behind the podium and the President is but a puppet being mastered with strings from a stage of corruption. Scandal is my latest viewing, we’re only on season two, so I have no idea just how much more my own conspiracy theories will be challenged in the days to come.

My name is Michelle, and I am a Netflix addict.