I sincerely believe that televised news, at least in these United States, is the strangest, most surreal goddamned thing out there. It is such a bizarre, rapid-fire clusterfuck of disconnected, disheartening shit with stories picked purely based on entertainment value with little to no regard as to how one piece might transition into the next.

The thing is, the news comes packaged with attractive people explaining to you what each story is about and why they’re showing it to you. So here’s what you do.

Mute the news and turn off captioning. This will remove all context for you leaving behind only a confusing barrage of imagery. You’ll see things like police crime scenes, followed by a smiling, pretty lady at a desk, followed by cute kittens in a shelter, with a ticker underneath all the while telling you sports scores and other assorted crap.

I really, truly recommend everybody do this. It is simultaneously enlightening, flummoxing, hilarious, and perfectly horrifying. This should work with most news programs any time of the day or night in any developed country. You’ll probably have a different experience in, for example, North Korea or China, but, hey!, you can’t be on this internet anyway, whaddya think you’re doin’! Why I oughta…

Now, you might argue that this is unfair to the news and that of course the juxtaposition of different stories is going to seem odd when there’s no context to orient you, but I argue that this surreality is specific to news. Other television programming is more thematically controlled (except for maybe American Horror Story) and, even without context, you’re more likely to be able to ground yourself to some extent. Like if you saw a show about ballet dancers, there’d be a lot of shots of them dancing and suiting up and being in one of those dancing rooms with the hardwood floors and the mirrors and you’d get it was a show about dancing and they were training and the dancing was important to them. You could tell if it was a serious show about dancing because the dancers would be generally quite severe or somber or, if it was comedic, people would be falling on their asses all the time.

The news is just cherry picking from life that which will garner the highest ratings. The “true-life” entertainment that the news provides a day-to-day sampling of is worth broadcasting if it’s tragic, elating, upsetting, adorable, frightening, dramatic, zany, etc. It doesn’t really matter so long as it technically or probably happened and it’s likely to elicit a strong emotional response of any kind. And this isn’t to say that life is just that slapdash and the news is just casting a spotlight on it because that’s bullshit. Life is typically far less thematically erratic. The news just televises the anomalies.

Today, while at the gym (which is where I get all my muted, local news), I saw some kind of extended promo of a sleek coffin that had a giant IPod-type system installed inside of it and a woman’s hand kept lovingly running along the coffin’s exterior. Then it went back to the newscasters, laughing.

It was the strangest thing I’d seen in a long time.