My ten-year-old daughter loves the television show “CSI.” Not “CSI: New York” or “CSI: Miami,” but the original: “CSI” (Las Vegas). She thinks being a crime scene investigator would be “cool.” I tell her there’s a lot of tedious work involved that’s too boring to show on TV. And that the investigations we see solved onscreen in an hour could take months, maybe years, to complete in the real world. She’s ten, so this means nothing to her. She wants to be like Warrick. He gets the job done in an hour.
I have to admit, these shows can be quite addictive. The trick is to avoid getting hooked in by the first sixty seconds. That’s where they trap you. If you follow along for sixty seconds, you’re a gonner. Your best-laid intentions for the next hour are toast.
If I had to pick a favorite character I’d choose Gil Grissom. Grissom is an overly intelligent, highly confident forensic entomologist who loves his work. Work is his life—he really has no other life. And he loves puns. He also loves spouting off verbose opinions and heady literary quotes. He’s smart. I’ll bet he could solve a complex crime in an hour.
I don’t know much about bugs and I don’t know if I’ve ever quoted literature, but I do like to race bicycles. I love it. It’s not the first sport that comes to mind when one mentions team sports, but it is an organized team sport. And so, one evening after succumbing to the first sixty seconds of “CSI,” I heard Grissom defend his lack of athletic interest with something like, “The overbearing patriarchal structure of modern organized sports represents a socially palatable sublimation of what Jung refers to as the ‘shadow of the unconscious’.”
What? I had no idea what he was referring to, but I’ll bet he was comparing this “shadow” to football or rugby or hockey, maybe even basketball, but surely not all team sports. Surely not cycling.
I couldn’t remember the quote by the time the mystery was solved an hour later, but fragments of it rattled around in the back of my brain for a couple weeks. I finally couldn’t stand the rattle anymore, and so I Googled it. You bet I did. (Don’t even get me started on this magical invention.) Though I only remembered the words “patriarchal” and “organized sports,” I found my quote in three clicks. One more click and I was wading through the dark quagmire of scary people with scary motives and monsters and bloody rampages envisioned by Jung.
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