Life without TV

June, 1996. My apartment almost unbearably oven-like as I lay on the couch, fan wafting stale hot air down on me. An empty pint of Ben & Jerry’s sat on the glass coffee table, condensing an ever-widening circle of water from the air. A video was playing on the TV – it was, appropriately, Heat starring DeNiro and Pacino. You’ve seen the movie, right? Remember the end, the very end, a cat-n-mouse hunter-vs-hunted turn-the-tables extravaganza? Remember who bought it at the end?

Well, it was at that precise moment, that … my television bought it.

My first instinct was to bang the top of the set. I did. No luck. Then, I powered it off and on. Still no picture, though I could hear the music over what I assumed to be the closing credits. Hmmmm. When you troubleshoot a PC, you’re supposed to let it rest for thirty seconds before powering it back on. I turned it off again, and waited an anxious five minutes before switching it back on, pacing like an expectant father outside a 1950s delivery room.

Nope. Nothing but a black screen. Not even that little white dot in the middle.

Thus began my inadvertent journey into the unknown: life without a television set. I don’t know why I didn’t just go to the store and buy a new one. I had money back then. I even had a Toyota pickup truck with plenty of space to transport the biggest TV set I could find. I just didn’t buy one. Probably laziness, probably a little bit being afraid of looking dumb (I have an allergic aversion to whatever’s the latest in technology).

The first couple of days, I have to admit, there was a void in my life. It was weird, and quite disconcerting. I wasn’t addicted to television, or so I thought. There weren’t too many shows I watched regularly, but I did enjoy watching the Discovery channel, A&E, classic movies – even the sci-fi channel before it started only airing its own lame productions. MST3K was a staple on Saturday mornings, and I always rented videos Saturday and Sunday nights. Now – nothing but blackness.

But then I found myself not missing it that much. To fill background noise, I started listening more to music and even talk radio for the first time out of my car. I remember one bizarre July night defrosting the block of ice in my freezer (helping it along with a butcher’s knife) and listening to four hour’s radio news coverage of the plane that exploded just off of Long Island.

By August I found myself completely cured of my TV addiction – or so I thought. For some strange reason I started, more and more, to look forward to my bi-monthly trips to my mother’s house to do my laundry. My mother has a 42-inch monster television set.

I broke down a month later and bought a new TV. Oddly, I still remember the date (it was September 12) and the very first movie I watched on it (it was From Dusk Till Dawn). By the end of the week I was coming home, snapping the TV on for background noise, and going about my nightly routine. Habits very quickly reappeared and set, like drying concrete. Today, I still have that TV; it’s in my bedroom and my wife, daughter, and I probably watch it a dozen hours a week. I hate it with a passion but it will remain there until it dies.

Then, my whole family can do a television detox. Nah, we’ll just do our nightly viewing with the new flatscreen we bought, May 2, in our living room.