How the fuck did you get back on?
My earliest memories of it are grey light static and the pleasant rain of nothing. The knobs that snapped into place with a Zen exuberance. The mystery of digits that tuned to no station. Something like 40 stations listed but only three to be found.
In Alaska it was still the frontier and we had the benefit of late stage private television stations. One ran old cartoons and blow pop commercials non stop with no program and no adherence to the laws of hourly intermission. I wasn’t anywhere else so I can’t say if we got cable early or late.
That fake ass plastic box with the wood trim exterior and a glowing red 88 style channel display. A wireless remote. Channels. Channels dedicated to the breadth of human existence. The higher numbers? Complete movies. Art. Schlock. The top digits? Breasts. Shaking asses. French movies that seem to have plot but feature genitals.
The screen in my house as a child went to sleep. When it got late enough there was simply nothing on. Like the bars, eventually they close up and send you all home. One big communal slumber to be had. The next day? All the chatter about the three streams of nightly information. Did you see the story on NBC, CBS, ABC, or did you read it in the single paper we print here? A child’s rainbow of information. Five colors.
Cable promised no commercials. A rare admission from Babylon of the nature of the game here. Just pay us up front and we won’t have to make money letting others manipulate you and attempt to destroy your psyche. Sounds like a good deal, I like having a psyche.
The punchline of course is that cable adopted commercials and how. Maybe the promise was always just the sidelong idle swear of a car salesman. Now we’re on the hook. Someone said that the Super Bowl is not a football event but it’s a television event. A television holiday. Like the Macy’s parade it was meant to somehow transcend our individual towns and raise us all up in a simulacratropolis.
I think it must have been the Iraq War. Up until then we were all just happy to eat the corn flakes they sold us. But the cup of total horseshit runs over and Joe Sixpack figures out they were absolutely fucked raw in the barn by a passel of god forsaken hell demons bent on murder. Yellow Cake, dog.
So the cords got cut. En Masse. If you were awake or aware or a reader or a listener or into alt music or liked film or jazz you joined and simply turned that shit off. We kept our screens, but for engagement at will. Sure I’ll watch Citizen Kane. Right now.
But no more cola commercials jammed between our lifestyle commercials jammed between our distributed talking points in defense of water boarding. And fuck these assholes for ever trying.
So I repeat.
How the fuck did you get back on?
