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We all have our little shrines and testaments to that which is important to us. We all have the places in our homes and offices where we display the trappings of life, the things we need to reach easily, the detritus of our pasts, and the significances of our selves.
For most of us, North Americans at least, the more promiment of these shrine-like spots is the top of the television set. There sit s the family photos, the Christmas cards, the knick-knacks, the keepsakes, the gifts, and the things we want others to see.
Since no one visits me, what sits on top of my television set is important to me only. I am not sending messages or signals to anyone but myself. With others, with those whose homes look like display cases rather than living spaces, perhaps what they put there is some kind of show for the pleasure and note of others.
I don't know. It fails to matter.
It's a focal point you see, the top of the television set. It is the one spot you can be assured of everyone eventually looking. It is the spot you spend most time staring at - unless you're an internet junkie - in which case your focal point and shrine is the top of your monitor.
The shrine of media becomes the shrine of living.
Currently, the top of my television set houses 13 Neon Genesis Evangelion VHS tapes given to me by a friend. (No, I don't like anime, but they are English language versions, and the friend in question thought I'd be the one best deserving of them. He knows that, a, I can't read subtitles and watch a film at the same time, and b, that I don't know any Japanese. This is what is known as appreciating the intent and spirit of a gift, rather than simply appreciation of the object.
The top of my monitor houses papers and a webcam, an American dollar coin, a SuSE install CD, my Cuban cigars, and a Smashing Pumpkins greatest hits CD. None of these things is any sort of momento really; none are of great significance, and are not there for display. Yet there they sit, piled precariously as the result of having nowhere else to store things, and being too lazy to find a place.
Such small spots, the tops of televisions and monitors, and yet they can hold so much of importance.
2025 06 14: One wonders, in the day of wall-mounted flat screens and frame TVs, and most folks not even owning a desktop computer that would need a monitor such as the humble CRT of the past, where people put their shrines ... and what do they put on them.