I wish therapy was cheap. I wish it was easy to get into. I’ve spent months on a waiting list to just now start seeing a therapist, and it takes a few months to really know if you’ve found the right fit enough to make real progress.

But you know what’s always there and ready for you? TV. Or music. Or – of course – the whole internet with streaming sites and bootleg downloads, access to the whole world of trashy and comforting art. Stuff that seems ridiculous or juvenile, but still somehow appeals to something inside you.

Whether it’s watching Princess Bride when I have to stay home sick, or throwing back a few cocktails and watching endless episodes of “Star Trek” over and over again, I have so many things that I turn to when I need that kind of comfort and mental companionship.

I don’t intend to do reviews or criticism here. There are going to be things I recommend that are objectively poor in quality, and maybe even morally objectionable on the whole, but they’ll have something in them that I’ve found helpful in my own self processing. If there’s something that’s genuinely morally problematic about something I’m going to mention here, I’ll try to explicitly disown such aspects, but my goal here is to focus on how I use the art in question to interrogate myself rather than the reverse.

I’m also going to do my best to write and post this with as little editing or overthinking as possible. I tend to get wrapped up in such things and never actually get the damned thing done, so for this, I’m going to try and practice less restraint. You can expect lower quality writing overall, but I’ll actually finish more. Not that I actually expect anyone to read this stuff, but I figure it’s better to set my own expectations on paper, as it were.