Woah! Woah! Woah! - Part Two - Really.

I’m a criminal. When it comes to wasting electricity, anyway. One of the worst. Lower than low.

When home alone and busy doing anything or nothing, I’m notorious for having every TV in the house on to a different channel, volumes muted while the stereo blasts in the front of the house and the radio back in the kitchen. I guess I enjoy the sensory overload. Or my ADD is way, way outta control.

I was living up to this rep when Sarah got home that night. The radio in the kitchen was tuned to my favorite night of public radio broadcasting while the bedroom TV was tuned to SportsCenter. Across the house, Early Man's killer, Ozzy-fied debut Closing In cranked from the office stereo and my bass amp rested in mid-surgery on the coffee table across from the other TV which I’d completely forgotten was halfway through showing the third film of the night, the hilariously over-the-top, historical art-porn epic, Caligula.

I’d watched maybe about five minutes of it occasionally looking up from the puzzle of wires in the amp. There's somthing profoundly funny about glancing up at the TV screen and catching a few seconds of a beheading, a castration, a full-on orgy or a pompously over-acted monologue. In that respect (and because it’s damn near impossible to sit through the entire snail-paced, plotless mess), Caligula is far and away the best background movie out there.

So, I always try and tone down the multi-media assault for Sarah’s sake, but being as wrapped up as I was, I forgot and in she walked to the weird world of my alone time. The sonic battering flipped her equilibrium and she stumbled into the living room only to see the filthy speaker cabinet and its innards up on the coffee table. Her expression went from revulsion to shock when she spun around and saw the TV.

Now, Sarah’s no prude by any means, but after the one-two punch of the noise and the mess, she just wasn’t prepared for the whole thing to be lit by the glow of--of all the damn crazy moments in the movie--the "skin lotion" production scene, aka the circle jerk scene. If you’ve seen Caligula you know which one I’m talking about. Ugh. If you haven’t, don’t worry. There’s really no reason to put it in your headspace out of the context of the movie. Unless you’re into that sort of thing. And if that’s the case, you’ve probably got all your favorite web sites bookmarked.

Anyway, that was it for poor Sarah. She looked at the TV, then at me, back and the TV then back at me before rolling her eyes and walking off to dismantle the audio-visual nest I’d made for myself that evening.