By Richard Z. Santos

The first three months of quarantine I inhaled media like a junkie in the Union Square of the kind of gritty old movies I love so much.

Coatlicue Girl by Gris Muñoz. The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones. Survivor Song by Paul Tremblay. Made in Saturn by Rita Indiana. The Lost Book of Adana Moreau by Michael Zapata. A Silent Fury by Yuri Herrera. Tigers, Not Daughters by Samantha Mabry. Zero Saints by Gabino Iglesias. Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss. The Oedipus Trilogy with my high school seniors; one of whom reacted to the death of Antigone while zooming in from her job at the grocery store. And many more.

I read War and Peace through the literary journal A Public Space’s twitter read along. I now get to be that guy at the (zoom?) party spending all night trying to bend the conversation to the proper point where I can casually drop that tidbit. “No thanks, I actually hate Bulleit whisky and think the owners are awful people and it doesn’t even taste very good. Ugh, sorry, I sound just like Pierre just before the invasion of Moscow when he decides it’s his destiny to kill Napoleon.”

I started reading a book by a psychiatrist who claims that demonic possession is real, but I stopped reading that book after I received a phone call from a person who asked to speak with someone with THE EXACT SAME NAME as the author.

I’m not going to list all the comic books I’ve read but here are the highlights: assorted X-Men comics old and new, Cosmic Ghost Rider, Sebastian-O, Black Hammer, Vampire Tales, Morbius: The Living Vampire, Menace, Marvel Mystery Comics, Tales of Suspense, and The Black Ghost by Alex Segura.

I approach the wealth of the Criterion Channel by going straight to the movies expiring every month and ticking through as many as I can before they disappear forever (or at least show up on Amazon Prime for $3.99).

I burned through ten film noirs on The Criterion Channel as background noise while working, cleaning, or playing with my daughter. For a week, my day’s audio soundtrack was dramatic strings, gunshots, and the shrill cries of mid-century American white men unsure how to navigate the post-war world that still held them far above everyone else but just a teeny notch below where they were before the war.

I watched the first three Hellraiser movies and called it research for a writing project. (Despite what that friend of yours in high school claimed, the third one is actually better than the second.) I watched the only film Saul Bass directed--it’s about really smart ants. I watched the original Westworld and even Futureworld, the sequel, which did nothing but make me 100% confident that Josh Brolin would have been awesome to hang out with in the 1970s but Peter Fonda would have been the worst.

I watched three seasons of Better Call Saul in four days. I’m on the third season of Ozark even though I’m still not sure I even like the show. I’ve watched a season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and a season of Cheers, which doesn’t sound like much nowadays, but is impressive when you remember that network shows used to deliver twenty-five plus episodes a season. I’ve watched two seasons of Absolutely Fabulous, which sounds impressive until you realize the British know that sometimes six episodes is all you really need.

I watched season three of The Expanse but can’t finish season four because the little progress bar in the menu shows me the exact spot on the exact episode that my mother reached before she died this May.

While going on walks I strap my one-year-old to my chest and slip a little speaker in my pocket, so we can listen to podcasts. We’ve listened to The Ballad of Billy Balls, The Left-Right Game, Son of a Hitman, Hunting Warhead, Someone Knows Something, You Must Remember This, The Plot Thickens, The Winds of Change, and countless episodes of Uncover, Gone, Unexplained Mysteries, Men in Blazers, The Magnus Project, In Our Time, and many more. We walk through the neighborhood, the sound waves behind us like a wake. It must be really annoying.

I’m forgetting lots of titles. I’m forgetting whole movies and entire books because I read them electronically and can’t just glance at my shelf to remember them.

Which is all to say that I’ve burned myself out.

For the past three weeks, I can’t finish anything. I’m halfway through that demon book, All God’s Children by Aaron Gwyn, The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, and Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. I loved the first half of ‘Da 5 Bloods but haven’t finished it. I’m three episodes into season two of Homecoming. At night, I read two pages of a Silver Surfer issue from the 1970s and then read half of a Fantastic Four from the 1960s, then do part of a crossword puzzle on my phone, and then go to sleep.

Even my one-year old daughter, who loves flipping pages of her board books, reaches down and turns the page before I can read all of the words. We finish The Pout Pout Fish in about two minutes.

Entertainment used to be an escape, now it’s an expectation and, like with everything we take for granted, I’ve grown resentful of both its presence and its absence.

If I don’t have a podcast playing in the nursery, or a movie playing in the living room, or if I’m not scrolling through the endless menus of the endless apps on our Roku, then I feel a kernel of anxiety in my gut bloom into something large and angry.

The stock market podcasts I listen to (don’t ask), say that quarantine has sped up trends that had started long before. In a few years everyone was already going to be working from home, having everything delivered, and wondering where all the stores went. But now we’re doing it ahead of schedule and no one knows what will happen next.

I fear the same happened to my brain. Did I do too much too fast? Have I consumed a year’s worth of entertainment in three months? Have I become like my fifteen-year-old students who think movies are too long and who don’t even pay attention to the TV shows they do watch?

At this point in an essay, I’m supposed to come up with an epiphany. That’s what makes it a worthwhile essay. I’m supposed to show progress and reach some important realizations. I should say something about how I’m going to go on a media fast and just sweat it all out like Sinatra in The Man with the Golden Arm (also on Criterion).

But I don’t know what to do.

I don’t know how to turn a movie or a book back into a treat instead of a retreat from trauma, grief, and fear.

Maybe this new podcast about mindfulness and mediation will tell me.

Richard Z. Santos is a writer and teacher in Austin. His debut novel, Trust Me, was published in March 2020. He is a Board Member of The National Book Critics Circle and served as one of the 2019 Nonfiction Judges for The Kirkus Prize. Recent work can be found in Texas Monthly, Kirkus Reviews, CrimeReads, and many more. In a previous career he worked for some of the nation's top political campaigns, consulting firms, and labor unions.