idiot box spongebob — and i’m fairly sure

idiot box, spongebob informed me, is the term for a television. i find this generous. my television has been off for eleven days and i am still demonstrably an idiot, which suggests the box is innocent and the problem is upstream of the screen. the upstairs neighbor — file tag the_4b_guy — runs his at a volume that defeats the silence anyway.

parked at the desk, second mug, the chipped one. carla is in the budget review on the floor i third have by my own honest accounting, until 3:14pm before someone notices i am not in the calendar invite.

the phrase idiot box spongebob arrived in my morning the way most phrases arrive — through a search bar, at an angle, while i was technically pretending to format a spreadsheet. spongebob, in the episode in question, is told that television rots the brain. he treats this as a challenge. i, on the other hand, treat it as a diagnosis.

the question is whether the box is doing the rotting or whether the rot is, frankly, pre-installed. i am leaning toward pre-installed. my screen is dark. my brain is on. the rot continues. i would like that on the record.

idiot box spongebob: a phrase from the spongebob squarepants episode “idiot box”, in which patrick and spongebob abandon a brand-new television in favor of the cardboard box it came in. the show frames the box as superior to the television. the show is, on this point, unusually correct, and i’m fairly sure most television criticism since has been an attempt to catch up with a sponge.

THE BOX. IS. NOT. THE PROBLEM.

i need that on the table before we go any further. some readers will tell you the television is what makes a person dim, and they will say it from a podcast, which is, if we’re being honest, just a television without the picture. these readers, i suspect, have not lived above the 4B guy, who has the volume on his television cranked to a setting i did not know was available, and who, as far as i can tell, considers the wall between us a polite suggestion.

idiot box spongebob, the original case

the original case for idiot box spongebob, as far i can as reconstruct it from one viewing and a screenshot i did not save, is that patrick and spongebob receive a television, ignore it, and play in the cardboard packaging instead. squidward, who in this episode is the only adult in the building, cannot understand why anyone would prefer a box to a screen. squidward is, in this respect, the audience. the joke is on squidward. the joke is on us.

the lesson there is if one is that the device labeled idiot box is not the actual idiot box. the actual idiot box is whatever you bring to it. patrick brought imagination. squidward brought resentment. the television was just a piece of furniture trying its best. i find this parable suspiciously close to a sermon, which is why i had to lie down for a minute after rewatching it on a phone.

i am, broadly speaking, a person who definitions try to fit and miss. there is a longer treatment of the word i wrote a few ago at weeks this same desk, which holds up better than i expected and which i recommend if you have eleven free minutes and a tolerance for self-applied insults.

why the term stuck

the term idiot box predates the show. my father called the television one in 1994, while watching it for nine consecutive hours. his father, i’m told, called it that too, with less affection and a worse couch. the phrase has, by my count, three centuries left in it before someone replaces “box” with whatever shape the screen has become.

the reason it stuck, i think, is that the box is the easier target. you can point at a box. you cannot point at the part of yourself that chose to sit in front of the box for nine hours instead of opening the mail. the mail is, this morning, on the floor near the front door, leaning at an angle a structural engineer might call “early stage”. one envelope is red. i’ll get to it. tomorrow. tomorrow is when i traditionally get to things.

so when spongebob’s episode landed, the writers were not inventing a phrase. they were inheriting one and giving it a small bath. the bath did the term good. the term came out cleaner than it went in.

the 4B guy and the wall

i would now like to talk about the wall between my apartment and 4B, because it is, in this story, the real idiot box spongebob. the wall is thin. the wall is, by code, supposed to be thicker. the wall is not thicker. behind the wall is a man who watches what i can only assume is a marathon of news commentary at a volume the wall was not designed to handle.

i have, on three occasions, considered knocking. i have, on zero occasions, knocked. the reason is simple: i have read the lease, i have read it twice, and the lease does not, technically, prohibit a man from being too loud at 11:14pm on a wednesday. it prohibits “unreasonable” volume, and “unreasonable” is, as a word, the most negotiable adjective in english. one man’s reasonable is another man’s structural complaint.

so i have stopped trying to win the war with the wall, and i have started narrating it. that is what i am doing right now. this is the narration. the 4B guy does not know he is in this post. he does not, as far as i can tell, read posts. he watches television. that is his right. the wall vibrates. that is mine.

what the phrase actually means today

today, idiot box spongebob works as a piece of cultural shorthand for a very specific argument: that the device blamed for our dimming is, on closer inspection, not the cause but the witness. squidward, in the episode, ends up envious of patrick’s box. squidward, by the end, is in the box, alone, hallucinating. the show, in its small way, is telling on him. the show is telling on us.

i am not saying you should throw out your television. i am saying, gently, that the television is unlikely to be the part of your apartment that is actually doing the rotting. the rot, i suspect, is structural. the rot was here when you signed the lease. the lease did not mention it. the spongebob squarepants imdb page agrees in spirit, though not in those exact words.

my own television, off for eleven days, has not improved my morning. my morning is the same morning. the same coffee. the same desk. the same angle of mail in the hallway. the only thing that changed is that the wall is louder, because nothing on my side is competing with it. the silence on my side is, in fact, a kind of amplifier. i did not know silence could be an amplifier. i know it now.

verdict, the box is innocent, the apartment is the suspect