Poor Howard regrets that another day has gone down without becoming a full master of himself. He intends to redeem himself a bit with this rant. His shame is mild, and he will survive to fight sloth another day, but he notices a sort of dull heavy feeling in the chest, and a voice inside telling him to work harder tomorrow.
He began the day with the best of intentions, but he was torn between working and enjoying the Lord's Day with his family. He awoke at 7:40, a respectable hour, but began the day on the computer, which always scrambles his brains. He often wonders why he must check his Facebook account. Is it Vanity? A need for approval? Or merely a bad habit akin to potato chips or other greasy food addictions. Perhaps it is all three. But he resolves to make amends for his foolish habit, or perhaps relinquish his account altogether. This would do the trick and close the door to temptation, but that would be an almost violent act, and he is growing too old for such rash and impetuous stunts.
On occasion he feels it is merely the truth of a modern epidemic of isolation which urges him to visit this vast cafeteria of his past life, which is what Facebook is. Poor Howard finds it strange that he can peep into the personal lives of people whom he can't even remember, except in name alone. But Poor Howard tires of his Facebook rant, and will revisit it another day, to probe more deeply into the mysterious power this addiction holds over his soul.
What peeves Poor Howard most of all is the vast chasm that lies between who he wishes to be, and whom he actually is. He can see the ideal form of his better self standing tall and proud upon the far cliff, but he senses that he may never reach the great heights that his alter ego has scaled. But this is too abstract.
What he means to say, is that he wishes he had not switched on the television to find the classic film Star Wars showing on MTV. He never watches MTV. He is far too old for such nonsense, but he felt a twinge of desire for news while he cooked his sad little ham sandwich and so he switched on the television, and there, instead of news, was C3PO and R2D2 and Darth Vader and the whole menagerie of fantastic characters. He was instantly transported into a galaxy far, far away, while his ham sandwich fried in the skillet. And so he lost two hours of his precious life to scenes he had seen again and again. Caught in some old time space continuum, He was both entertained and disgusted with his activity, a feeling he often encounters when the television snatches hold of his attention like that. He longs for more control over the technologies which plague him in his environment but finds that he has the willpower of a willow, whatever that might be.
When he lived alone, in his old, sinful but quasi-monastic existence, he did not own a television. But now, while living in the suburban comforts of his mother's home, he finds that there is a television in every room. If it were his choice, he would have sold all four of them, and used the remaining money to have a great big reunion of his friends or perhaps take a trip to California, but the televisions are not his to sell, and so he must learn to resist them. But his resolve in this matter is weak, and so he prays that tomorrow finds him stronger, or finds the televisions shattered into a million little bits.
