Between you and me, I’d just as soon not parrot what someone else says. And so, the first week, I just sat there in the church basement trying to figure out how I could get the hell out of there. The problem was Gywneth, Mike’s wife. And they were the reason I was there in the first place. Talk about persistent. Our circle of friends all learned early on if we didn’t do what dear friend Gywneth decided we needed to do, well, in a heartbeat, she’d quickly register our resistance and then escalate her advice into a full-blown intervention. And having sat through a few of Gywneth’s efforts to help others, I knew I had to give this people-helping-people thing a shot.
In truth, Gywneth had paid a great price—loving, living with Mike and his disease. There wasn’t an excuse I could offer she hadn’t heard before from Mike. For Mike, it began with “NCIS.” Then before they knew what was happening he couldn’t/wouldn’t miss “NCIS: Los Angeles,” then “NCIS: New Orleans” then onto “Hawaii Five-0” and “Seal Team,” and “Lethal Weapon” and then “FBI.”
But back to me. It took a few meetings. I was probably a bit paranoid at first, but I was freaked by what I felt were the growing looks of impatience I got as I sat, sullen and silent, while they shared and poured their guts out. Those weeks before, I brought myself to say what everybody else had gotten themselves to say: “My name is Bob. And I overwatch.”
A month more and I began to share my story. And like most heterosexual men, the way I understood and told my story began with a woman.
In the interests of privacy, let’s call her Penelope. Now, to be clear, I know, especially since my time with Overwatch Anonymous, that it’s really my fault. Me, myself, and I. My problem, my weakness. But I’ll start with Penelope merely to provide context.
Like so many before me, I fell in love with Penelope. Adequately describing beauty is beyond me. But my Uncle Thomas, a scholar who could barely make it through a conversation without mentioning his doctorate in comparative literature and his four decades teaching at Columbia, pronounced Penelope “A Wonder of Winsome.” That was during the first and only Thanksgiving I made the mistake of bringing Penelope to. Turns out, when my attention was elsewhere, probably on Aunt Dottie’s delicious coleslaw, Uncle Thomas took both her hands in his, then leaned in close and put his tongue in her ear. Many of our older, hard-of-hearing relatives who were close to Uncle Thomas couldn’t figure out why he described the lovely Penelope in the same terms Uncle Ernie used at the track: “win-some lose-some.”
Probably because she suspected I might have decked Uncle Thomas right then and there, it wasn’t until the ride home that she admitted what he had done. Having heard earlier in the evening that Uncle Thomas was dying of leukemia, she was less annoyed than I expected. It’s probably relevant to note that this event predated #MeToo by a few years. And knowing Uncle Thomas, he probably whispered many a charming, sweet nothing before and after his tongue retreated. I suspect they both knew a slap could have killed him.
I admit when we returned home I had to consult with Webster. Winsome: “generally pleasing and engaging often because of a childlike charm and innocence.” True, Penelope was one of those blessed with ageless, timeless beauty. She looked as if she had stepped out of a Dutch masterpiece.
You might be thinking “What does any of this have to do with “NCIS?”, but please bear with me. You learn that the most impactful sharing is often accompanied by meanderings here and there. But I’m pretty sure it all connects somehow. Anyway, I soon learned that Penelope’s seeming innocence was born of a desire to remain oblivious to how her family’s fortune grew. She had this little gesture, the hardly noticeable flick of her fingers, which meant “enough.” It took me a while to realize that there was only losing if one kept insisting on speaking once the fingers had flicked. She had found such a delicate way to deliver the message that it was time to move on. And if you didn’t stop, she would. Emotionally, then physically. Noticeably turning away from an apologetic kiss.
Have you ever had the feeling that you’ve stumbled into love? That you’ve wandered into and have become trapped in the midst of a local, amateur rendition of “Midsummer’s Night Dream”? So much to do with the money. Yes, the money. My lovely Penelope was royalty, a Titania, a Queen; and I was a Nick Bottom, a weaver of sorts. I come from a long line of mechanicals: a veritable multigenerational collection of Snugs, Flutes and Starvelings. Metalworkers, carpenters, tinkers, tailors. I missed the moment but somehow, a Puck or his appointed barista had administered his magic lovestruck fairy flower juice to Penelope’s Lavender Latte. And I was the first man she saw after the administration. And I obviously didn’t know I was the ass in this drama until much later.
I know this isn’t Elizabethan England and I appreciate that it’s a significant ask for you to imagine Penelope as Titania. But given our stark differences, I can’t imagine a more reasonable explanation of why she fell for me. Certainly, Penelope’s money was much more contemporary than Shakespearean. Her family celebrated their success with art, jewels, multiple homes and Range Rovers, not wishes for love. And their bounty was magnificent. Thanks most recently to their holdings across the world in Mata Atlântica where her grandfather was known by the locals as the Butcher of Brazilian Rosewood. Worth several flicks of the fingers if you reminded them that, thanks to their family, another glorious forest had bit the dust.
I met Penelope after her marriage bit a different dust. Hubby Garett Creighton, whose family sold pharmaceuticals that cost an arm and a leg, had the unfortunate habit of sleeping with their au pairs—French, German, Swiss, Italian, his tastes universal. Penelope, who was sought by most, was nevertheless at that point remarkably loyal, and never ever strayed. Finally, when Garett ran off to St. Barts with her putative best friend, Skylarke Pemberton, Penelope grabbed their son, Mustang, called the family’s lawyer, and left Hawaii for the mainland.
You’re probably thinking, “Mustang—get real.” But Mustang was very real. Premature by a month, he was from the beginning a sensitive soul, thin, short and shy. He was one of those unlucky boys who needed glasses by 3. He was born a Matthew but Garett, like the rest of the Creighton men, were bullies. Garett persuaded Penelope that Matthew required special dispensation. At the very least, a bold name he’d be forced to grow into. First, a name he couldn’t hide from, then a regime of rowing, boxing, soccer, at a prestigious German military boarding school. Garett, of course, was lounging on a beach on St. Barts when Mustang had to defend his name in the Black Forest.
She came not for me—remember, she didn’t know I existed—but for the local famed McChristo School, considered by some New England’s best school for troubled youth. And Mustang who, though his mother was oblivious, was well aware of his father’s messing with the very young women who were supposed to be his caretakers, then more than annoyed to realize he was exiled to Germany not for his benefit but his father’s convenience, well, yes, that upset and troubled him dearly.
For reasons that escape me, many very wealthy people were comforted by the dubious teachings of Alistair McChristo, Ph.D., who not only required the adults to pay a substantial tithe for the privilege of entrusting their kids to him seven hours a day but insisted they join their children in the never ending mandatory pseudo-therapy sessions he called “Circles of Caring.”
Given the alternatives, I imagine it made sense to Penelope that Mustang would be a bit safer with Alistair McChristo than he had been with the boarding-school bullies.
Mustang helped us happen. He had a playdate with my godson Spencer, who I adored and often hung with so that my best friend, Eddie, and his wife, Diane, had a decent shot of preserving their marriage. Spencer and I had made a mum’s-the-word secret pact: No one had to know about our Saturday afternoon excursions to the Silver Moon Bar and Grill to stuff quarters into the antique Asteroids computer console. Mustang agreed to our simple swearing-in ceremony and proved to be an arcade game natural, blasting away asteroids with great skill.
It might have been a month later. I was at CuppaCaffeine where I was supposed to be building a website for arniesfinefarmtotabletables.com in between sips of espresso. But every time I read the copy, which unfortunately was written by Arnie himself, my attention drifted from his website-in-progress to ESPN’s coverage of the Red Sox.
At which point I felt a tap on my shoulder. There was Mustang, a beautiful woman in tow. “Hi, Bob!” he said, then wasn’t quite sure what came next. “Hey, Mustang. Good to see you … I should be working but I’m not … So, are you going to introduce me to your friend?” She extended her hand, “Penelope Creighton … He saw you and all of a sudden my son lost any interest in the donut he coveted and said he needed to say hi to his friend and dragged me over here … First time that’s happened: I assume you’re the Bob he goes on and on about.”
It probably took about a month and a half for me to get all this out at Overwatch Anonymous. Ours was a quick and tempestuous coupling. Before I knew what was happening, I was attending an unending batch of McChristo extended family potluck dinners—and because Garett Creighton could rarely be located and attendance of all adult influencers was required for the “Circle of Caring,” I was too many times forced to listen to Alistair McChristo invent reasons why it made sense for 60 people to sit there and wait for the one person who spray-painted “Alistair sucks” on the outside of the arts building to confess and repent. One session about a half-smoked spliff lasted 18 hours until Abigail Simpson toppled from her chair, wailing “Sorry … sorry … sorry!”
All of this waiting seemed to make sense to the gaggle of guilt-ridden parents but bored the hell out of me. Much like McChristo’s vaunted theory of “Re-integration,” which went sort of like this: In olden days, young and old shared the shelter. The old taught the young the ways of the world—taught them to hunt and fish, the arrow and the bow. Today, we send the young off to be schooled by strangers without any real understanding of what they’re learning and how. At McChristo, we restore the balance. Parents—the adults—study what their children study. Read the books, multiply and divide. Re-integrate. Restore the personal, parental connective tissue. Living and learning together. Which meant Penelope and I had to read “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens because Mustang did.
But for my fellow Overwatchians, and the Overwatch program, the essential fact of my new life with Penelope was that McChristo despised TV. You wanted into the Circle of Caring, you wanted to Re-integrate, well, your TV was out. Kaput. And so Penelope, like all her fellow parents at McChristo, quickly grew to hate TV. Her TV. Their TVs. My TV. The TVs of all they knew. Hated them so much they were outlawed, covered at first and then, as their resolve grew, physically removed from the premises. And it was the smallest stretch for this hatred to spread to computer games and my beloved Asteroids and every electronic medium that annoyed the Alistair.
Done. Gone. Which ironically forced their children to seek out spare TVs wherever they could, a band of secret watchers, newfound TV junkies all of them. The word would go out and bam, they’d gather in a heartbeat in front of the magic box, transfixed, zombie-like. I know this to be true because it happened to me. All of a sudden, I found myself at TVTown, standing before the biggest high-def set they had, watching whatever was on. Before I knew it, I was officially hooked. And before I knew it, I was outed. Eleanor Montgomery, who had not one but two kids—multiple problems—at McChristo and was rumored to accompany him on occasional weekends to his pre-college program, McChristo Plus, in the Bahamas, just happened to look into TVTown’s big picture window on Main Street. A moment later, she enthusiastically dropped a dime on me.
I have to thank Penelope because I know she doesn’t know this but she’s partially responsible for my recovery. Well, actually it took a while for the lesson to sink in. It was one afternoon when I convinced myself I needed a black raspberry cone from SoCo but never really made it past TVTown. Yet again. Tommy, the assistant manager, told me not to worry. They thought it was a selling point that someone so visible through their window loved their TVs so much. I must have been perched for an hour or so in front of a new Sharp watching college football when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Penelope looking in, checking to see whether Eleanor Montgomery’s intel was on the up and up. I looked up and saw her. And it was as if she had shot me—I’ll never forget that profound look of pity on her face. She immediately looked away and hurried off.
The ground rules at McChristo were clear. A day later I was banished from the Circle. An offense a hundred times worse than spray-painting. She handed me my toothbrush.
I really don’t blame Penelope for falling in love with Gunther. He was German. Of the Dortmunder beer Germans. He actually understood calculus. He could help Mustang a heck of a lot more than I. He actually enjoyed watching the kids sweat in the Circle, waiting for one or more to crack. Had even read McChristo’s “Revolutionary Re-integration.”
I was bereft. I loved her so much more when she was gone than when we were together. I found a two-room apartment on the poor side of town. Bought a second-hand copy of Dickens’ “Bleak House.” Got myself a Sony on sale from TVTown and the introductory TV package from Spectrum. And thus began my long dark slide into overwatching.
Maybe you know what I’m talking about. Denial. It’s a very big deal. I told myself: it’s all about education, beginning with PBS and their nature shows and the science shows and then “Frontline” and the “PBS NewsHour.” Nothing wrong with learning, I told myself. And when I shared this, I’d see folks nodding at Overwatch. They know how it works. Roberta H. added: “Yeah. then it’s MSNBC and CNBC and CNN! You know, we call them the pushers. Spectrum, Time Warner, Charter. They keep changing their names. Dealing 24 hours a day.” At which point Donny offered a wry laugh: “And you don’t even need a prescription.”
And because I could build websites at home with my Spectrum wifi, I slipped into daytime TV. Kathie Lee and “The Price is Right” seamlessly into the soaps. Let me tell you, “The Young and the Restless” is a lot better than you think. Brian was the first guy at Overwatch who quickly raised his hand when I asked, “Who besides me loves Oprah?”
As they say at Overwatch, one thing leads to another. And an overwatcher will watch anything. Because an overwatcher knows there’s a reason for watching everything. I found myself saying things like: “Rachael Ray just taught me how to make this fantastic quiche!” and “What’s the chance Daenerys Targaryen, mother of dragons, would like to have dinner with me?”
And still I thought I had it under control. Like so many addicts, I said, “I want to. I don’t have to.” I was convinced I could stop whenever I wanted.
If you spend a lot of time in public places, and website developers and software coders and various subsets of writers often prefer the constant buzz of conversation to the sometimes crippling silence of a home study, well, then you’re often tempted to join the conversations of your nearest neighbors. I should have known I was headed for a fall when I jumped into a conversation taking place at the table behind me. This lady had spent about five minutes complaining about her back, telling her sympathetic companion about the miserable night’s sleep she had gotten at the motel down the road.
I’m not sure what possessed me—and actually that’s probably a pretty accurate description—but I pivoted in my seat and heard these words coming from my mouth: “Juggling all the things we do is a challenge. But, hey, it’s a fun challenge. And our Tempur-Pedic helps it all work. It gives us the best night’s sleep ever. I recommend my Tempur-Pedic to everybody. The most highly recommended bed in America just got better. Now more rejuvenating, more pressure-relieving than ever before.”
I guess I was lucky because the lady didn’t smack me but said instead: “Really. My friend Irma has one and I actually thought about it.”
I smiled and continued on “There’s no better time to experience the superior sleep of Tempur-Pedic. Save up to 500 dollars on select adjustable mattress sets during our Fall Savings Events. Visit tempur-pedic.com to find your exclusive retailer today.”
A day later I was back at TVTown in front of that Sharp. Tommy was telling a customer about the subtle differences between the Sonys and the Samsungs, but I was watching curling as if my life depended on how well they swept the ice. Then they cut to a commercial: “Whatever your big job is, come into the Ram Black Friday Sales event. And get a great deal on the truck with the best resale value in the industry.”
Without missing a beat, I joined in: “And find out for yourself why more people are switching to Ram trucks than ever before. Because of all the things you’ve built this year, some are sweeter than others. Great deals going on all month at the Ram Black Friday Sales event. Now get one thousand Black Friday bonus cash for an average ten thousand dollars in total values on the all new Ram 1500.”
“Holy shit,” I heard from behind me and then a quick apology from Tommy: “Excuse me, ma’am … I’m so very sorry but I’m worried about my friend over there. It’s worse than I thought. Why don’t you take a look at several of the TVs and see which look you prefer? I’ll be with you in a second … Hey, Bob, do you have a second?”
Actually, I didn’t. Did Tommy have any idea the Canadians had two more stones to throw? The Ukrainians were closing in … You couldn’t pick a worse time to interrupt. I tried to shush him but he was shaking his head. And slowly it dawned on me that he was giving me the same look I got from Penelope.
But I literally couldn’t help myself. I began to tremble. It was like one of those spooky zombie shows I usually tried to ignore. Tommy later told me the color drained from my face. I reminded him of a ventriloquist’s dummy. Then I heard myself saying “As a Spectrum TV customer, you can watch what you want when you want on demand. With a click of your remote, over 40,000 titles are waiting for you. Thousands are free.”
Tommy reached out for my hand, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t done. And then I said: “Watch TV shows, movies and primetime on demand. Catch up on full seasons of your favorite shows. And if you subscribe to premium channels, you can access the networks’ full libraries at no cost. You can also watch 40,000 on-demand titles from the Spectrum TV app. Select “on-demand” on your remote and watch right now.”
Tommy led me to the home-theater room and got me into one of the comfortable chairs. He told me I was asleep within minutes, which is when he must have called Gwyneth and Mike. That night, Mike took me to the Overwatch meeting at the church.
It took three meetings before I heard the most accurate description of what had happened to me. Jessica was talking about how she had gotten to the point where she couldn’t wait for the next episode of “The Big Bang Theory.” She called it “falling into the Spectrum.” While she was waiting for the new episode, she binge-watched the old.
It took six meetings before I couldn’t manage to make it all the way through the Entresto commercial. I got the beginning right: “What does help for heart failure look like? It looks like this. Entresto is a heart failure pill that helps keep people alive and out of the hospital. Don’t take Entresto if pregnant. It can cause harm or death to an unborn baby. Don’t take Entresto with an ACE inhibitor or …” and that’s where my brain hit the brakes. “Or …” And I tried again “Or …” All of a sudden “aliskeren” was gone and for the life of me I couldn’t remember the side effects. Poof, no more “angioedemia,” no more “low blood pressure,” and “kidney problems or high blood potassium” had disappeared forever.
The more meetings I went to, the more I shared, the less I remembered. Gone was “Real meat treats from Rachael Ray Nutrish” and some of my most treasured sayings: “We’re Voya, we stay with you to and through retirement.”
Jessica shared that milestone moment when she couldn’t remember that bladder leakage had been getting in the way of camping trips. For Mike, it was the morning he had forgotten that the Omaha Steaks Favorite Gift Package was filled with $232 dollars’ worth of great food for just $59.99.
I know if you’re anything like me, you’re probably not willing to accept that you have a problem. But bear with me for a minute. Let me ask you a simple question: Are you reminding yourself at two in the morning that, for drivers with accident forgiveness, Liberty Mutual won’t raise their rate because of their first accident? And don’t you really want to get out of bed to Google Liberty Mutual, thinking you’ll save $782 on home and auto insurance? If so, it’s time for Overwatch Anonymous.
I know. My name is Bob. And I overwatch.
