Overwhelmed by a stream that has turned into a flood

Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen have collaborated on a series of podcasts, which my wife and I think might be interesting, even though we don’t know exactly what people do on podcasts. But we probably won’t watch them, anyway, because they’re only on Spotify and we don’t know what Spotify is, either.

“Maybe it’s a streaming service,” I suggested, “like Netflix or Vimeo.”

“It could be a phone thing, like Instagram or Pinterest,” my wife guessed.

When I Googled Spotify, I learned that it was a “freemium application.” Then I Googled to learn what a “freemium application” was.

All that learning probably won’t make much difference, though, because we don’t know if Spotify

appears on computers, phones, televisions or all of them. We’re doing our best to keep up with the latest entertainment sources, but it’s become overwhelming.

Several years ago, when our television choices had expanded to include hundreds of channels we never watched and our cable bill was getting out of control, we tried cutting back. But we couldn’t agree on which hundreds we did watch. I wanted to keep ESPN and she held out for HGTV. So we compromised by keeping both of them and adding Showtime.

Part of our dilemma is that we want to keep current on popular culture. In 1999, for instance, you couldn’t go to a cocktail party without hearing everybody discussing the latest episode of “The Sopranos.” So we had to get HBO to understand what they were talking about. It was either that or stop going to cocktail parties.

When “Orange is the New Black” broke out, we had to add Netflix. Then we needed to get Amazon Prime to watch “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” not to mention reruns of “Schitt’s Creek.”

And the race to keep up shows no sign of slowing down.

Just last week, for instance, “Saturday Night Live” aired a skit poking fun at Gina Carano, which we probably would have enjoyed if we’d known who Gina Carano is. I Googled her, too, and learned that she had been a star on something called “The Mandalorian.” I guess that means we need to get Disney+.

We’re drowning in streams of entertainment that have become a flood and I’m not sure how much longer we can keep our heads above water. And we still don’t have Hulu, Crackle, Philo or Flickr.

So even if we do figure out the Spotify stuff, we’re probably going to miss out on those Barack and The Boss podcasts.

Because we’re spending so much time trying to keep track of all the entertainment sources available to us that we don’t have time left over to watch any of them.