spongebob squarepants idiot box — 1 investigation

spongebob squarepants the idiot box, the episode, was watched by my mother on a sunday with a nephew of indeterminate origin. she described eight scenes and i counted nine, which is roughly the kind of math i can do before the shower passes the four-minute mark.

the desk is the desk. carla is in the all-hands on the third floor, the one nobody volunteers for, which is why carla is there and i am here. the rest of the morning belongs to me, in the way mornings belong to anyone who has decided to write a list instead of a status update.

i opened a tab. i closed a tab. i opened the same tab. then i wrote this.

spongebob squarepants idiot box, why this list exists

the episode is called “idiot box” because the box is the joke and the box is also the manifesto. patrick and spongebob throw the actual television away and climb into the cardboard packaging. squidward, who is the productivity bro of the show, watches them be happy inside an empty rectangle and loses his mind because he cannot do it. that’s the whole bit. that’s the whole show. the people who got it, got it in 2002. the rest of us are catching up.

i am, by every honest count, catching up. so i made a list. eight reasons the episode tracks. for the cluster context — the manifesto on this whole word lives at the idiot, a leading expert says hello, which is the pillar i keep returning to when the desk gets too quiet.

i watched it on SpongeBob SquarePants the way mom watched it: by accident, while someone smaller in the room insisted on it. season 3, episode 17. the date is in the corner of the page. the date is not the point.

the eight reasons the episode still tracks

i am presenting the eight in the order they hit me, which is also the order in which they explain my life back to me, which is suspicious and also fair.

1. the box is the appliance. the moment they decide the cardboard is more interesting than the screen, the show becomes a small philosophy. i have a microwave under the counter — the seventh, this is the seventh i have killed — and the microwave does, on most days, less for me than the box it came in. the box has held a yoga mat. the box has held two unopened bills. the box has been a footrest. the appliance has held a plate of pasta and given up. the box wins. the box always wins.

2. squidward is the productivity bro. he hears them having fun and demands an itinerary. he wants to know the system. he wants the workshop. he wants the playlist. he is, in cartoon form, the man who tweets at 5am about cold plunges. he cannot tolerate joy without a method. i recognize him. he lives in my notifications.

3. imagination is just refusing to look at the bill. when patrick yells “imagination” with the rainbow hands, what he is really saying is “i have decided not to engage with the actual problem in this room”. this is, technically, the entire pile on my counter. the unopened mail and i have an arrangement. it imagines i will open it. i imagine it does not exist. we are a working team.

4. the box has zero notifications. there is no push. there is no ping. there is no read receipt. squidward enters the box later in the episode and hears every sound effect in the world from inside it, but those sounds are not asking him to reply. they are not asking him to do anything. there is, i would argue, a study about this in a magazine i once read at the dentist, the one with the good chairs. the box is the inbox before the inbox.

5. it is, quietly, a take on cardboard. the show does not say it. the show implies it. the cardboard is the hero. the screen is the villain. squidward is the casualty. i am, on this point, in agreement with a small yellow sponge from 2002. that’s a sentence i did not expect to write, but here we are, and it is what it is.

6. the third yoga mat lives in a similar box. the third yoga mat is still under my couch, possibly evolving, definitely judging. it lives inside the cardboard tube it arrived in, which i did not throw away because i had a vision: maybe someday, this tube. the tube is the box. the box is the tube. the yoga mat is, in my reckoning, three years into a one-year warranty. it has been used for the duration of one episode of spongebob. that episode, in a small twist, was idiot box.

7. it is twelve minutes long and says more than the q3 review. i have not been to the q3 review. carla goes. carla returns with the look. the q3 review takes ninety minutes and produces a deck. idiot box runs eleven minutes and forty seconds and produces a worldview. the math is unkind to the deck.

8. the take on showers fits here, against my will. hot take number whatever from the bench: showers over 4 minutes are theatre. the four-minute shower is, in my house, the one productive ritual i defend. spongebob and patrick, in the box, are doing the same thing — refusing the long, performative version of a thing that should be small. the box is the four-minute shower. the screen is the rainfall showerhead with bluetooth speakers. you see what i’m saying. or you don’t, and that’s also fine, the box doesn’t care.

THE BOX. WAS THE POINT. THE WHOLE TIME.

i should also say: i think the show was making a quiet argument about the way people only see what they expect to see, which is, technically, the bias of confirmation in toy form, and the cluster has discussed it in more sober language. squidward sees stupidity in the box because he is looking for stupidity. patrick sees a spaceship because he is looking for a spaceship. both of them are right, in the only way “right” really works, which is privately and without witnesses.

mom called sunday and described the same plot

mom called on sunday. she always calls on sunday. she said “i was watching the cartoon with the sponge”. i said “okay”. she said “the one where they get the box and they do not use the tv”. i said “okay, mom, i know that one”. she said “well i did not”. she said “the small one was laughing for what i would call a long time”. she said “and i was thinking, this is what your apartment looks like”.

i said: my apartment does not have a box that big.

she said: your apartment is the box that big.

this was, by the standards of the call, a great line. mom does not waste them. she has perhaps one a year. she saves them for sunday. then she said remember to pay your water bill, and she hung up, and i opened the bank app for two seconds and closed it, which is the modern version of opening it.

closing pulpit, the box wins again

so the verdict, formally, is this. spongebob squarepants idiot box is not a dumb episode about a box. it is a smart episode pretending to be a dumb episode about a box, which is a higher form of being smart, which is the form i aspire to but mostly miss. patrick is the one who got it. patrick will always be the one who got it. the rest of us are squidward with better posture.

i am not going to rewatch it tonight. i’m going to think about it during a shower that will, on my honor, run under four minutes. then i am going to look at the unopened mail. then i am going to not look at it.

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