TV

I think maybe I am kind of done with it.

Just now, for the billionth time, I have shut off a tv with no one watching it. Someone on the screen was screeching and yabbering about something and I just went CLICK and it was done. Actually, I think this can add to an excellent dictionary definition:

Television:
n.
1. The transmission of dynamic or sometimes static images, generally with accompanying sound, via electric or electromagnetic signals.
2. An electronic apparatus that receives such signals, reproducing the images on a screen, and typically reproducing accompanying sound signals on speakers.
3. The visual and audio content of such signals, including screeching, yabbering, rambling, annoying quick cuts, poorly written and performed dialogue, manipulative Disneyings, exploitative coverage of personal tragedies, Larry King, NASCAR, and remarkably useless weather predictions .

Now, I am no tv crab, don’t get me wrong. I spent almost every second of my youth watching television, and television has many good aspects, like Big Joe’s Polka Party, South Park, laughing at celebrities’ skin in HD, and documentaries showing a 100-year-old Chinese man smoking while squatting next to a hut. Oh, but so much of it is so…mediocre. I think I have reached my psychic limit on “meh.” Something truly horrible or truly great = worthwhile. But so much on there is just nothing. Not funny, not compelling, not thought-worthy, not even mindlessly relaxing. It does not hold my ass to the couch any more.

I do recognize that tv is actually much better than it used to be, probably. I mean, I watched Gilligan’s Island every week and now when I happen to see it, it seems to me like it was written by a pothead chimpanzee. I watched Days Of Our Lives from the time I was five to almost 30. WTF? I finally ended that sick relationship when one of the main characters came back from the dead for, really, maybe the fifth time and a bell went DING in my head and said, THE WRITERS FOR THIS SHOW ARE CYNICAL AND HOOTING AT YOU. I could take it no more. I divorced Days Of Our Lives, and got back an hour of my life 5 days a week. Not that I did anything useful with that hour, but.

I imagine later on when I am ancient, I will be forced back to the tv. My eyes will be too crappy and tired to read, my ears too rocked out to hear music properly. I will lie in my Craftmatic Adjustable Bed, arthritic and annoyed, to channel-surf through what will be by then thousands of specialty channels, like the Malaysian Knitting Network or The Comedy Channel VIII: Sitcoms Featuring Unconventionally Attractive Women! , and I will shout “SUCKS!” at each selection I pass by until I drift off into elder sleep for a few hours at a time. One of my pretty and bold grandchildren will take the remote from my age-spotted grip, turn on “Jackass: We All Died Eventually Just The Way You Would’ve Thought, Cool Heh Heh Heh,” and laugh loud enough to wake me, and I will throw a pill dispenser at his or her cute head.