God mode

The second pot of coffee.

Things are tense between us at the moment, but we're working it out.

Gee, if only they had called it "Thankless Medium for Which You'll Be Tricked into Writing for Free" instead of "blog," I might be drinking beer right now.

Mid-thirties and on the outside of an in-joke

I suspect I'm becoming a parody of something, I'm just not sure what.

What I learned when I stopped driving so fast

Inevitability bears me to work just fine.

Solemnly, we ask for redress.

I hope I'm not the only person who takes as a personal slight the way automatic doors pause, as if reluctant, before opening.

Every day in every way

I'm not obscure. I'm "nichey."

One of the few pieces of advice I'll stand behind

I have been spared much heartache in life by not trusting people who don't drink coffee.

Why I show up to these things

To practice enthusiasm.

Tree, fruitless variety

From the doorway to the office she watched me as I sat in front of the computer, picking at my fingernails with a pocketknife, adjusting my headphones, winding up a yo-yo, stacking errant papers, capping and uncapping pens.

"Want some lunch?"

"Can't you see I'm writing?!"

The ineffable magic of used books

It's the added thrill of possible contagion.

Recurring dream

... in which I have controversial garbage.

What kind of priest takes this confession?

Lately I have been strangely profligate with lint rollers.

Dubious Achievement Form 2Q5R

I bored ___ people today.

There ... in the corner ... it's my conscience.

We were up until two, chasing down the mosquitoes, squishing them against walls and pinching at the air.

"I don't understand," she said. "Where are they coming from? How are they getting in our house?"

I didn't say I dimly suspected it was some manifestation, some avatar of my morals.

This is how we eat ourselves.

On the freeway the other day, I saw a dilapidated, eggshell-hued Buick Regal identical to the one I drive. Rather, it was identical except for one thing: It had a sunroof.

I am ashamed to admit it inspired in me a brief spasm of enraged jealousy -- more so than if the other car had been, say, a Porsche or a Mercedes.

A Question I Am Afraid to Ask the Owner of the Dreamcatcher Hanging From the Rearview Mirror of His 1978 Buick LeSabre

"What kind of monstrously deformed turgid baffling saliva-strung savage dreams do you catch with that, anyway?"

Increasingly Flimsy Excuse Not To Just Give In Already and Get That Tattoo #4,551

I may want to sell my body at some point.

Consumerist habit maintenance training will resume promptly at 3

When I was at the store buying air-freshener, I instinctively reached back deep into the shelf in order to get a fresher one.

A curious mix of circumstances, including my desire for cheap beef jerky and the tendency of 99-cent stores to use cast-off bags, resulted in this.

Carrying meat in a PetSmart bag.

I thought I was just eating a soft candy called Hi-Chew I bought from a Korean market. Little did I know it was a journey into darkness.

"Whoa. Whoa. I was expecting these to be gross. They're actually good."

"What are they like?"

"They're, like, way softer than any American candy I've ever had. And the grape flavor isn't overpoweringly sweet."

"Let me try."

"It's like eating a grape-flavored baby."

"How would you know what a baby tastes like?"

"I don't. All I mean is they're really, unnaturally soft. Like you'd expect baby flesh to be."

"If you what? Decided to bite into it? That's just gross."

"You know how baby's skin is."

"Yes, but I've never wanted to eat it."

"I'm not saying I want to eat baby. The candy's just soft. Okay, fine. It's soft like bubblegum. Is that better?"

"Too late. Baby-eater."

I don't know why it makes me suspicious

... but pizza has become alarmingly cheap.

Would you like your nothing in paper or plastic?

After much thought at the checkout lane, I finally passed on buying Bubble Tape, M&Ms, Mentos, Tic Tacs, petroleum-free ChapStick, a Snickers, ClearEye artificial tears, or a Bic lighter because I realized that in thinking about it so much I was clearly violating the spirit of the impulse buy and therefore didn't deserve any of it.

Psyche, briefly glimpsed

"Hey, look. It's a primitive bashing tool shaped like a fish."

"That's a paperweight."

A talent for paranoia, revisited

These days, even the explosions are telegenic.

Friendships have been built on shakier foundations

We just happened to like all the same drugs.

I shudder to imagine what would appear when you peeled back the cellophane sheet, and the steam faded to reveal ...

Victualz: Lunch Goes Xtreme

It comforts me deeply that you always have these things, dear receptionist, as though you are bound by a solemn code

1. Avon Moisture Therapy Lotion

2. Craisins

The Closest I Ever Want to Come to Being Some Manifesto-Thumping Guru of Nativist Literature, or, Why Can't Anyone Get the Vegas Novel Right?!

When Charles Bock's novel Beautiful Children finally came out in January -- after what seemed like wave upon unrelenting wave of prepublication hype -- I spent a showerless weekend on the couch, reading it in a simmer of nail-chewing envy. I doubt I was the only local writer who bloodied up his cuticles over this supposedly seminal Great Las Vegas Novel -- penned, no less, by a guy who grew up here. Sure, we won't readily admit our envy; we mask it with dismissive snorts and the smirks of armchair critics. But take it from me, a writer capable of jealousies as volcanic as they are petty: We are glowing green with it.

We? Yeah. We. You see, many of us grumbling members of what could charitably be called the local literati have long promised, whether secretly or publicly (read: foolishly), to be among the first to take a stab at the Great Las Vegas Novel. We don't talk about it much beyond our little writing circles; it's got the same fey dreaminess of saying you want to be an astronaut when you grow up. If you believe the hyperventilations on the dust jacket of Beautiful Children, though, Bock hasn't just stabbed, he's succeeded. Consider the "advance praise" gushing from the back cover: A.M. Homes writes, "Charles Bock has delivered an anxious, angry, honest first novel filled with compassion and clarity." Jonathan Safran Foer: "Beautiful Children careens from the seedy to the beautiful, the domestic to the epic, all with huge and exacting heart." Not to be outdone, Walter Kirn invokes the Writing Gods as he takes wing for the stratosphere: "With Algren's fearlessness and Whitman's empathy, Charles Bock takes us somewhere in Beautiful Children that most of us would be afraid to go alone: across the neon deserts of the new West and into an underworld that is the world. Trust him, follow him. This is a journey, and a novel, that allows no turning back." (Upon reading this, I half-expected the book to sprout some pulpy appendage and reassuringly take my hand.) Some of the major review organs have been no less generous. Writes critic Liesl Schillinger in the New York Times: "Bock's evocation of experiences most people will (mercifully) never share, and his depiction of each man, woman and child's personal mythology is ravishing and raw."

Those testimonials explain why I -- and no doubt other brethren toiling away at their own fictional accounts of Las Vegas -- tore through the book in a weekend spent cocooned in grubby flannel and jeans. Oh god oh god. Did he do it? Did he really do it? Did he really really really write the Great Las Vegas Novel really? Later, my stream of consciousness was tempted to hurl this drippy botch of a novel across the room in a mix of dashed hopes and mislaid relief. But that wasn't at least until Chapter 3.

My wrenching disappointment isn't just over this mess of a book. Actually, it's not about a particular book at all. Not to me and other Las Vegas writers, anyway, who are struggling to put this city on paper. Rather, Beautiful Children arrived as a touchstone for our furtive, slow-boiling frustration -- a frustration felt as both readers and writers -- over how difficult it is to get Vegas right in fiction. I know, I know: Already this is starting to sound like the sour-grapes wail of some no-status local writer over boo-hoo how hard boo-hoo it is to get his oh-so-neglected work boo-hoo published. But it's much more than that. Slap me if this sounds grandiose, but my troubled meditation brought on by Beautiful Children has to do with our status as a city of emerging consequence. You mean to tell me we've got a blossoming downtown, hard-knuckle, big-city scandals going off left and right, world-class artists, restaurateurs and performers being courted by the Strip -- and no brick of a novel to call our own, no title to raise and wave like a standard -- not even a local literary tradition? A New Yorker who has roots here parlays some dark imaginings into something resembling a novel and the reading world swoons? Here we are, Las Vegas in the 21st century, growing up fast, but it's like we're still missing fingernails and eyebrows. Nothing life-threatening, but hell, it sure is creepy.

Bock's aerobically overwrought work will go down in history as a nice try that earns, at most, an encouraging nod. Now what? Next! That's what. So if he didn't pull it off, who's gonna write the Great Las Vegas Novel? Believe me, writers here are trying hard -- maybe too hard. Which is the problem.

Inside the neon machine

We writers may live in Sin City, but we happily go in for religious feeling when it suits our sense of urgency. And for us, the Great Las Vegas Novel is the Holy Grail. Holy Grail is the perfect term for it, too: In my time drinking, talking and fighting in various writing groups -- whether in the classroom or the barroom -- the Great Las Vegas Novel was a holy object that inspired a near-religious sense of mission that, more often than not, ended in lip-biting grief. The first group I fell in with took shape several years ago as part of the first wave of MFA students in UNLV's creative writing program. The official business: In a book-lined meeting room on the sixth floor of the Flora Dungan Humanities building, we'd sit around a big wooden table and critique each other's short stories and novels-in-progress. It was kind of like trying to have a dignified water balloon fight: No matter how much order was imposed, things would always get messy, whether because of some badly aimed snark, a perceived personal attack or undue defensiveness on some writer's part (worst of all, though, was your story eliciting toxic silence).

But the real important stuff happened across the street. After those three-hour sessions of mincing nitpickery, a select group of us would peel off and head to a dive bar called the Stake Out. Over cigarettes, French fries and endless pitchers of Bass, we'd gossip and kvetch, carry on affairs and plot intrigues, and eventually get around to the alternative fiction workshop we had rigged up like some backroom poker game: trying to write the Great Las Vegas Novel. We swapped ideas and advice, tips and techniques, covering everything from how blackjack dealers really talked (it seemed like they were always appearing in fiction as hirsute quasi-goombahs given to calling everyone "buddy") to informal matches of "That Would Make Such a Great Vegas Novel!," in which we'd fastball premises at each other -- Lounge singer hits his head and inexplicably begins talking in a British accent! Consequences? We never wrote them down, of course, because, we were heartily pretending we were too original, too clever to actually use them. (A confession: I later wrote, but never published, a story about a lounge singer who hit his head and inexplicably began talking in a British accent).

But the Great Las Vegas Novel idea sat there, gravid among the smoke and the chatter. I don't mean to be cute with the capital letters. This was an artistic mandate on an order of nothing less than Ezra Pound's dictum to "Make it new!" After all, other cities had shelves bursting with definitive works. New York had its Bright Lights, Big City; Los Angeles, its Ask the Dust; Chicago, The Man with the Golden Arm, or, for sunnier dispositions, The Adventures of Augie March. What did Las Vegas have? Okay, we had Leaving Las Vegas, John O'Brien's graceful rendering of intent despair. Thing is, Leaving Las Vegas had been realized more powerfully as a movie than a book, thanks to Nicolas Cage. (Five years later, Cage starred in Gone in Sixty Seconds, which somehow erased everything good and productive in human history up to that point.) So, on a technicality, Leaving Las Vegas didn't count.

That left us Stake Out writers in a unique position, a place (to our beer-addled minds) of grave artistic responsibility. On one side of us, there sat a corpus of hackery and genre fluff about Las Vegas -- thrillers, murder mysteries and suspense tales populated with pasteboard thugs and hygienically bland heroes, or the umpteenth urban-fantasy entry that transported werewolves, vampires or wizards to modern Las Vegas. On the other side, there were respectable but arid works that invoked but didn't inhabit Las Vegas, novels such as Gregory Blake Smith's The Madonna of Las Vegas and Chris Bachelder's Bear v. Shark. These thinky satires aren't really set here, though; rather, they exploit the city as a thematic funhouse in which to do some winking pomo vamp about concepts such as authenticity, identity and consumerism. Indeed, it seems like the farther away the writer is -- physically and experientially -- the more irresistible the temptation is to deploy Las Vegas as a mere cluster of tantalizing, riff-ready abstractions. It's like: Welcome to Fabulous Las Vague Us.

But oh! Our advantage: Babies born into a historical moment! University writers being bred inside the neon machine! We were here -- here in Las Vegas so richly, deeply, rootedly and ordinarily that we were, quite in opposite fashion, sooo over the bright nonsense that comprised Las Vegas in the popcult imagination and fueled the stereotype-sodden glurge that poured from the paperback factory. We also had a leg up on those perhaps too-keen intelligentsia whose novels had more sparkle than sentiment. Postmodern brainiacs like Blake Smith and Bachelder didn't have to get to know the "real" Las Vegas of slot machines and cocktail waitresses; who needs field research when you're writing a novel to make a point? Sensational dreck on our left, academia-stamped flamboyance on our right, we needed only invoke that magical workshop truism -- write what you know -- and we Stake Outers, beer pitchers and cigarettes in hand, would usher in a golden age of Las Vegas literature.

It was too easy to squander our unique opportunity. Problem is, we had so long lived in the sooty strip mall-and-cheerless suburb reality that we, too, had cynically cordoned off that "real" Las Vegas of slot machines and cocktail waitresses in some artistic quarantine zone -- for there, we thought, lies a sure path to hackdom.

Writing against the glitz

So it became that our conception of Great Las Vegas Novel would brook no cliche, would not condescend to traffic in stereotype or flimsy trope. Mobsters, lounge singers? Ha! Save it for the pulp writers. Showgirls, blackjack dealers? Please. You might has well have your protagonist shout "Vegas, baby!" as a signature catchphrase. What would the Great Las Vegas Novel have, then? It would have ... well, you know, The Truth about Las Vegas. Oh, and this Truth -- it was From the Inside! We knew there was something vast and important to be written about this dusty, neon-laced nexus of corporate greed, consumer fantasy and good old-fashioned American dreaming, and by God we were going to write it. And it didn't necessarily involve poker. (We knew little about poker). Or dice. Or tourists. Or strippers. (We knew nothing about strippers.) What began as a wordwright's mandate soon curdled into something more like a rulebook, which made for a lot of workshop prose that positively tortured itself to make some important -- but painfully elliptical -- point or other about Sin City.

Both consciously and unconsciously, we were reacting against all the awful or simply misfired literature about Las Vegas, but we had mistakenly held the setting responsible for what was actually a serial case of bad craft. We imagined the Las Vegas of popular conception to be lethal to good fiction, a minefield to serious literature. Thus our way to avoid the slightest whiff of cliché or stereotype: having our work deal only in the most tangential way with any recognizable Las Vegas theme or feature. So wary -- or fearful -- we were of falling into the trap of cheeseball lit, we became misers, dropping a reference to Las Vegas here or there in our work to acknowledge a hometown connection -- but only as though to prove real life took place off the Strip. Being decidedly unVegas was the only responsible way to write about Vegas.

Here's proof of how bad we sucked

OK, time for the painful confessions. One result of my hypercautious tinkering (writing seems too hale a word for it, really) was a story called "Coordinates." It was about a recently unemployed poker dealer whose daughter runs away and whose son is starting to exhibit signs of the kind of creepy, emotionally barren precocity that suggests the tyke's going to be a Class A sociopath. (If you guessed I was dog-paddling in a sea of Raymond Carver at the time, you win!) In the final scene, the father is talking to his son via a walkie-talkie, because earlier mom had grounded the son to his room for some act of creepy, emotionally barren precocity at the dinner table (I seem to recall it was saying "fuck.") Anyway, through the static-choked walkie-talkie, the son comes through to the father as, like, the disembodied voice of God or something, solemnly berating Dad for causing the daughter to run away, all this while the Dad just wanted to reconnect with his son by playing a game of pretend jailbreak (he had started asking his son what his "coordinates" were for the escape -- but the conversation, see, became an exploration of the dad's moral coordinates!). The story was so dense and overserious I'm surprised it didn't split the workshop table in half, causing a shard of wood to stab me in my pretentious neck. What made it a Vegas story? Dad was a poker dealer (a fact dispensed with in one line). See, it was Las Vegas that had stretched out its bony phantom finger and laid this curse on the family! Of course, reading the piece, you would have never known that. The point is that the farther away we writers got from the "real" (read: tourists') Las Vegas, the sharper we presumed our ferocious, misunderstood artistic vision to be. But, in all honesty, the story could have taken place in Duluth. It was because we were committed to writing against the glitz, to playing against type. We were over Las Vegas before we even gave it a chance.

That was the fatal irony. In trying to somehow rescue a fictive Las Vegas from the real, shabbier one that seemed to contain so much vibrant gaga, we writers -- not the city -- were the ones doing a sacrilege against literature. We had bought into an artificial distinction, and it proved deadly. After we moved from rejecting cliche on the one hand and hackneyed portrayal on the other, we started eating into healthy tissue: setting, sense of place, even harmless swatches of local color. In fleeing the excesses and failures of genre work, our stories -- arid, unplaced, self-consciously exiled with a surgical hand -- had wandered into Las Vague Us. It was as though we yearned to write so seriously about this city, whose core truths revolve around unseriousness -- excess and improbability -- we had scribbled a hole right through our subject.

There were two things happening here. One, we were facing down the monstrous insecurities that any would-be artist confronts living in a city best known for slot machines, showgirls and nightclubs. Is such a city worthy of art? It must be, went our tautological answer, because it was home to worthwhile artists. (Ahem! That was us.) We and we alone were going to show the world the real beautiful ugly wrenching joyous hateful splendor of the real Las Vegas. (None of us -- probably intentionally -- had bothered to ask whether the world wanted to be shown this.) At one of these beer-fueled meetings, someone went so far as to call himself a "neon-spangled Dreiser," but details are sketchy. (The rest of us were too busy aching with tragic clarity to notice.)

The second thing is harder to pin down. But it had to do with how Las Vegas -- from our black glass pyramids to our fake Monaco gambling getaways to our chlorinated Venetian canal -- is a city of concentrated fakery and fevered representation. My pet theory: This tangible fiction is so potent it in turn warps attempts to represent it in written fiction. How do you pen a work of imagination about such a heavily imagined city? Writing truthfully about Las Vegas is more or less straightforward for the journalist and the historian. For the fiction writer, though, the task is fraught with peril. Follow one bad instinct and you'll find yourself in the role of third-rate satirist or second-rate documentarian. Or, worst of all, a first-rate moralizing bore -- the crime of the artist who takes something far too obvious far too seriously. Is it any wonder Dostoyevsky is remembered for The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment and not his novella about compulsive gambling, The Gambler? Satire, reportage and moralizing are all forms of literary tourism, of standing outside and being enthralled or outraged by the silly, the exotic, the crude. And the last thing Las Vegas needs is more tourists.

Nor is writing truthfully about Las Vegas a matter of stone-eyed accuracy, of getting the geography right. Anyone can do that now, thanks to the Internet (though getting it blatantly wrong is hardly a recommendation either; Joe McGinniss, Jr., author of the recently published Las Vegas novel The Delivery Man, would be well-advised to take advantage of the obscure resource known as Google Maps when researching his next work).

The answer's in Argentina. No, really

This is a long way of saying that I'm one of many writers who has a drawerful of very tiresome Great Las Vegas Novel manuscripts in various stages of abandoned development (or maybe a better word is "malformation"). That drawer is like a back room full of mannequin parts -- lots of salvageable pieces that don't quite add up. I'm cringing even as I recall them now: There's the one about the razor-tongued punk rock girl who, while babysitting at the neighbors, suddenly hangs herself out of some (mistakenly) unwritten despair! There's another about a cheesy pick-up artist who plies his comically bad macking skills on the downticket women who shop at the thrift store near his house. His secret scar, of course, carried with a wounded nobility, blah blah blah: He's a recovering gambling addict! Recalling those failures, I can envision one of those dependably boring Big Richards -- Russo or Ford -- marshalling all the power of their kitchen-table psychological realism and really nailing Vegas with their wry pathos or studied sadness or narrative pussyfooting masquerading as artful irresolution ... or whatever the hell quality it is of theirs that so rattles the breastbones of book critics. Not my thing, necessarily. In fact, as my own determination to Be Serious seems to be mercifully evaporating in my thirties, I'm starting to wonder whether Vegas is necessarily best served by a responsible, artful, accurate treatment. Maybe the secret to getting Vegas right is through distorting the distortion, you know, presumably so they cancel each other out and create a clear picture. I'm talking about approaching the truths of Las Vegas through satire, parody or even fantasy -- but not some freeze-dried, offworld brand of the stuff that does little more than orbit around mere Las Vegas ideas. It's funny how Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas is enshrined as a model of raucous New Journalism, but it's the New, not the Journalism, that connects with its subject city. Hunter Thompson's bizarre methods were suited to his bizarre setting. At the risk of smothering ourselves with a manifesto, maybe we should ask the same of Las Vegas fiction.

My work began to improve only when I decided to take a cue from the Strip and look abroad for more inspired answers to the conundrum. I found it in Jorge Luis Borges' essay, "The Argentine Writer and Tradition." Leave it to a South American fabulist to write the best essay to ever address the difficulties of writing about Las Vegas. Borges basically says the worst thing a writer can do to his home country is to bite his lip and take painstaking, self-conscious aim at authenticity -- the surest way to miss the mark. A well-intended "profusion of local color" -- Borges' damning phrase -- marks the novice and the outsider. Just as bad as a slavish devotion to local color is enacting a grim prescription against stereotype -- an attempt to refute some facet of the city's meaning -- which can just as easily drain a work of vitality.

Once I understood that, I realized that someone from -- and of -- Las Vegas can't help write anything but a Vegas novel (not necessarily a good one, but it's a start). Unless he tries too hard, anyway. The trick, if there is one, is to not try so hard in precisely the right ways, and realize that while Las Vegas has its problems, the place itself isn't just a problem to be solved -- and, better yet, fiction isn't the place for solving problems anyway. (This is the part where I'm supposed to toss in a facile gambling analogy to drive home my point, but, truthfully, I don't gamble, which drives home my point. If it made sense to ask the question of whether gambling is inherently Las Vegan, I'd say not gambling is Las Vegan. It has to be; I'm a Las Vegan and I don't gamble.)

But lest I tumble into some cryptic Zen wormhole, I'll say that the Great Las Vegas Novel will do this definitively: It will illuminate ordinary life by exploring at least a few of the thousand ways that the two Las Vegases -- that of the tourist and the resident, their Las Vegas and our Las Vegas -- intersect and perhaps collide. The author of the Great Las Vegas Novel won't lock himself into writing against the glitz like we did, systematically starving our art as a way of lashing out at a reality we resented; rather, that glitz will be fashioned into a spotlight -- or a laser.

Beyond the neon my ass

My envy of Beautiful Children faded as I plowed through the novel, but I also found a strange kinship with Bock, if only because we share in the same sin: He, too, is writing fiercely against the glitz -- except he often does it badly, with limp characterization and all the rhythmic sense of dropped silverware. But playing against type seemed to work in his favor in many cases, however, as there were more than a few critics who happily overlooked the book's flaws, if only because they were flattered to be shown -- ooh! -- the darkness of life beyond the glare of the Strip!

I give Bock some credit for approaching the shadow of what a good Vegas novel might look like. The guy has definitely stumbled into a suspicion that there's something compelling to be written about the contrast between the city's public and private faces, the crack that separates the Strip from the strip malls. He competently captures the illicit thrill of youth running wild on the Strip; and there's occasionally a real heft to his sense of place, but often it's distorted by the same hyper-awareness of setting that bedeviled our own efforts -- taking form in the conspicuously "authentic" place-names no local would ever utter. My mom, a retired IV nurse, stuck needles in people for 20 years at Sunrise Hospital, and she never called it ... Humana Sunrise?! That's an artificial swatch of local color that only someone being calculated in his use of local color would use. So Bock's from Las Vegas -- great sales pitch, great story angle! But he's not of Las Vegas.

It's a symptom of a more general malaise: Bock's novel lunges with such dewy-eyed earnestness at Las Vegas' dreary underside of damaged gutterpunks, pornographers and teens stultified by suburbia that it's morally suspect. I think I know what happened, because it happened to us at the Stake Out: Bock approached the magnetic pole of the Strip, and look where it pushed him: into playing too hard against type. His earnestness in the face of so much artifice itself becomes artifice; in other words, he's guilty of the high artistic crime of being maudlin.

He's fallen into the same trap that ensnared us frustrated writers at the bar. The novelist who, with such calculation, tried to capture the city was, in fact, captured by the city; he was boxed in by the misperception that a "true" tale of Las Vegas must purposefully look askance at its machinery of chance and fantasy. What we get for that mistake is a 407-page milk carton ad for the tragedy of runaways and missing children. And an unsatisfying one at that. What happens to the bratty protagonist, 12-year-old Newell Ewing? We know he disappears, but why? How? At whose hands? We never find out. Maybe that's supposed to be literary, but I couldn't help suspect that Bock was merely folding.

And -- if I can indulge in one more homegrown metaphor -- in this game, the house wins.

Weekend report

I had spent what seemed like a half-hour explaining to stripper Nadia what a musket is, and what it means when it's stamped on a pill.

The only brand of voyeurism I can muster

Watching you watch TV.