Waste your time your own way, no matter how trifling

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Updated: March 25, 2012 8:12AM

Lest I be accused of painting a false image of my family life, one that consists of reading Tolstoy aloud and studying Latin, let me be clear: We do our share of slumping in front of the television, just like you, gaping with slack-jawed bovine indifference at whatever nugatory garbage happens to be spewing from one of the 500 channels.

Well, not complete indifference. At one point last week, a commercial came on.

“It’s a problem old as gaming itself,” the deep narrator’s voice begins, over the image of a young man in a mustard-colored hooded sweat shirt, reclining on a thrift shop sofa in his cluttered living room, clutching a console and playing a baseball computer game. “Stay home and just keep playing, or get to work on time so your coffee-breath boss doesn’t ride you like a rented scooter.”

Work or video games? Is that really a dilemma for anybody in the living world? No wonder unemployment is so high.

As is invariably the case in commercials, if not in reality, a solution to the problem — or rather, non-problem — is offered.

“Who says you have to choose?” the soothing voice continues, as the young man — obviously too busy playing to shave — resolutely stands up, sets down his game console and scoops up a Sony portable device. In a heartbeat he is bopping along the streets of Manhattan, traffic swirling past as he twiddles his handheld electronic gizmo, running the bases. “Your PS3 stays home, but the game goes with you. Never stop playing.”

The Steinberg family sat for a moment in silence. Then someone spoke:

“What is wrong with people?”

At first I thought it was me who had spoken — the voice sounded like mine, and was articulating the precise opinion that was currently sparking through my brain. But it wasn’t me; it was my 16-year-old son.

That was the beginning and end of the conversation. We all knew exactly what he meant, we all completely agreed, and any further elaboration was unnecessary.

I might have added, “I’m proud of you son. My work here on this Earth is finished. I can go off in a corner and die now, content.” But that did not seem the kind of thing that a responsible parent should actually say aloud.

My son’s question did come back to me on the train last night. A guy sitting next to me had one of those portable game thingies, which you have to tip, and he was flying some kind of fighter plane, his shoulders dipping to one side, then the other as he banked left and right, jinking his plane, firing tracers at the villains. I contemplated leaning over and inquiring, “What is wrong with you?”

But one of my bedrock rules is to never confuse something new with something unacceptable. People sniffed at paperback books, too, when they first came out, for cheaply disseminating dangerous ideas to those who would be better off focusing on their jobs at the thread factory.

Heck, it’s all entertainment, right? Reading a book, watching a movie, keeping up with a newspaper — potato, potah-toe. You have this extra time when you’re not working, sleeping, eating or performing some other necessary function, and whether you read about Socrates or play Angry Birds, it’s all merely a matter of personal style. Right?

Radio notes

Longtime Chicagoans might recall that radio call letters weren’t always just a meaningless alphabetic jumble, but stood for something specific — WLS, for instance, meant “World’s Largest Store” — it was owned by Sears. WVON stood for “Voice of the Negro,” and if you think that’s dated, WGN stood for “World’s Greatest Newspaper,” a claim that the Tribune somehow felt able to make with a straight face in 1924.

WBEZ stands for “We Broadcast Eric Zorn,” at least this Friday after 3 p.m., when my counterpart over at the Tribune will be a guest on the new afternoon news program hosted by my pal Steve Edwards, who returns to 91.5 FM to inject his trademark pizzazz into the murmuring calm of the NPR airwaves. And since good radio demands conflict, I’ll be joining Eric, to offset his carefully considered, fact-based opinions about the week’s most important stories in Chicago with a few of my own off-hand, harsh, intemperately blurted remarks that no doubt I’ll be apologizing for on Monday.