I started watching The West Wing again today. It’s the fifth or sixth time I am watching the series, start-to-finish, not counting watching the series when it first aired on TV. Joe bought me the 25-odd disk box set of the complete series one Christmas. I played all the episodes probably on a DVD player connected to the TV in the living room, though I missed a few random episodes every time I dozed off. It took about a week. I was home recuperating from one near-death medical emergency or another, and it was the holidays, so what better way to celebrate life than to relish the words of Aaron Sorkin.
After the DVD player and the TV were long-gone, I watched the show on one computer or another until the disk players stopped working. Eventually, I gave away the DVDs during a spring-cleaning purge. I gave away the complete Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, also. It bugs me that I have no memory of when that was, or what I was thinking. The physical heft of the box of disks had a tactile sense-memory attached to it that kept me tethered to a different time, another reality.
Today is Friday, January 8th, 2021. Two days ago, Wednesday, January 6th was the day of the Epiphany. “Have a merry christmas in an orthodox way…” my friend Andrew texted me yesterday (January 7th being 13 days after December 25th and representing the difference from the old Gregorian calendar to the new Julian calendar).
As I write this, the fictional President Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen, is practicing his State of the Union address to the 107th session of Congress. The sing-song dialog is playing in the background as I try to arrange my thoughts and align my feelings.