Once Again Among the Living, or, No Longer a Mutant

For the last few months, I've lived without television of any sort except for a few shows I've downloaded from the internet here and there. I gave up cable because my cable company is first and foremost a monopoly, and secondly, in league with Satan.

Why don't cable companies offer you channels a la carte, I ask you? I don't want to pay $110 per month just to get the channels I care about; in other words, I had to buy the super-secret-deluxe-ultra-gold package to get all the channels I cared to watch. This package included about eight different version of ESPN, the fishing channel, the cooking channel, and the staring at random things on the coffee table channel, none of which I ever wanted to watch. Not ever. You see, I don't want these fucking channels, but I had to have them to get those I watched regularly. And in truth, I only watched about eight or ten hours of TV a month, tops.

So, I axed the cable company (as I did the phone company, but that's another story). It felt good to tell them "you suck" when I was asked by the polite lady on the other end of the phone why I was canceling service.

Not only that, I had various incarnations of cable "technicians" (read: lucky to have found a job in this economy and don't know shit about cable) at my place at least eight times over the past couple years to improve reception which for no apparent reason, would often suddenly resemble the quality of a 19th century grainy tin photo. The shit really hit the fan when I decided to upgrade to "high definition" cable (because I do have a high-def TV monitor) and noticed that what I was seeing was a lot of something that was definitely not high definition television. It was ... cable reception, marketed as high definition television with a really neat box with an expansion card slot in which I could probably hide stashes of drugs very nicely. Not that I have stashes of drugs. I don't. But if I did, that would be a good place to put them.

Anyway, bye bye Giant Cable Monopoly in League with Satan.

I didn't really miss TV much over the past few months except for maybe the occasions I had the urge to watch "60 Minutes" on Sunday night (I know, not exactly the height of quality journalism, but sometimes they do a bang-up job with the odd piece) or, say, documentaries on the discovery channel. There were also a few series I watched on the ultra-premium-double-secret gold channels that I missed too. But my life continued unabated and I really didn't notice much other than not being able to participate in conversations with people talking about the latest reality TV show. Then again, I never watched those anyway.

Recently, however, I was given the opportunity to buy a high-definition receiver from a friend (you know, one of those guys who must upgrade every audio-visual component of his home theater system the second he knows there's something better available). So, I bought that, bought an antenna, and installed it. I now can receive over-the-air high-definition TV signals from local broadcast stations for free.

This in and of itself isn't a big deal. "So what?" you ask. Well, the odd thing I've noticed is that I somehow now feel more connected to the rest of the world. Even though I'm an internet junkie and certainly engage in activities outside of my apartment, there's something about a blaring TV, even in the background, that comforts me. Was it my years of growing up watching reruns of the Brady Bunch? Will I require TV for the rest of my life? Is my ability to view television shows, knowing there are other people in the world watching exactly the same thing at the same time my version of group therapy?

I have noticed that I'm not nearly as picky about what I watch either since this is, after all, free, and my choices are very limited compared to Satan's offering of 666 channels. I can't see myself spending an evening watching reality TV (although there doesn't seem to be much else in the way of offerings these days) but who knows? Maybe I'll find myself glued to the set every time the ... the ... Great Race, or whatever the hell it's called, is broadcast. You can count me out of Survivor if it's still running - I'd rather watch the Paint Peeling show or eight straight hours of C-SPAN.

So. I'm no longer a blue dot that lives outside of the circle of American Society. I can watch TV.

I am no longer a mutant.